I want to take my opinion out of this and I just want to look at what the government has produced. There is a document called “Youth Unregulated Drug Toxicity Deaths in British Columbia”. What they looked at were the years 2017-2022. What they found was that, if you looked at the deceased youths, there were zero per cent deceased youth with hydromorphone in their systems in 2017, 2018 and 2019. In 2020, the year safe supply came out, 5.5% of the deceased youth had hydromorphone in their systems. In 2021, 8.3% of youth had hydromorphone in their systems, and by 2022, this number had increased to 22.2%. What we're seeing is an increase in the number of youth who have hydromorphone in their systems at the time of death.
I want to be clear. This doesn't mean that the youth died from hydromorphone, but it certainly doesn't help to have hydromorphone in your system at the time of death. What I worry about is that this might be a marker for increased use among youth. We don't know. That needs to be studied more, but it's certainly something that needs to be looked into. The data for adults hasn't been released, so I just want to stick with the facts, and those are the statistics for that.