Madam Chair, I am very pleased to be here tonight to speak on this very important topic. The opioid crisis in Canada is killing more people than homicide, suicide and traffic accidents combined. We have heard the statistics and they are alarming: 8,000 Canadians have died from this crisis and 11 Canadians are dying each day. My feeling is that the actions the government has taken to date are not effective because the numbers continue to increase.
Canada is the number two opioid user. I grew up in a time when we got Tylenol and no one got opioids. We have look seriously at the solutions we need to put in place, so I am going to devote a lot of my time to discussing the kinds of solutions I think the government should be making. It is sad that in the fourth year of its mandate, the problem has continued. Yet the government knew about it from the beginning. It is clear it has absolutely no idea what to do about the problem, so I am going to make some helpful suggestions.
The first suggestion has to do with prevention. We need to prevent fentanyl and carfentanil from getting into the country. Although references were made to the Minister of Public Safety having a plan to increase resources, there is nothing specific. We see, on the other hand, that the United States has negotiated with China to make those substances controlled substances and to work together to prevent those drugs from leaving China and going to the North American continent. We need to do something similar. We need to step up inspection to make sure that these drugs do not come here in the first place.
We also need to work on education. I talk often with youth, who seem very unaware that trying opioids once could kill them because of the contamination we are seeing with fentanyl and carfentanil. In my riding of Sarnia—Lambton, there have been four deaths due to fentanyl-contaminated marijuana. Young people are not being informed about how dangerous it is to try these drugs even once. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Government in the House of Commons talked about the situation with the methamphetamine crisis. When I toured Winnipeg, I heard stories of people of all ages thinking they were purchasing a drug other than methamphetamine and then becoming addicted. It is so addictive, it is almost impossible to get off it.
There is an addiction problem across the country, and as we look at solutions, we need to make sure we are covering the gamut. The government, unfortunately, decided to legalize marijuana knowing from the experience of other other jurisdictions that there would probably be a 32% increase in the number of people using it. That is what happened in Colorado. Addicts today either started with marijuana or prescription drugs. The health committee heard this in testimony, so we know that the number of people we can expect to become addicted has increased. Depending on the study we look at, 10% to 17% of people who consume marijuana will become addicted to it.
We really need to do something about prevention on the prescription drug side. I do not know how many people watching the debate at home know of kids, for example, having dental surgery and being prescribed 30 and 40 tablets of an opioid. This is totally unacceptable, and it is definitely being over-prescribed. There was a time when opioids were not prescribed at all for dental surgery, so we need to step back and look at prescription practices.
Some efforts have been made across the country to educate doctors so that they will not over-prescribe, but there is more to be done on that because people still have access to and become addicted to these drugs, and then get into an endless cycle of addiction. The government has done a reasonable job of working with first responders in the provinces and territories on naloxone, so that people can be saved from dying from fentanyl and carfentanil. We saw some early deaths there.
Another thing we need to do is to prevent the demand for all of these drugs. The way to do that is by education, but also getting people off of drugs. That is where the Liberal government has really failed. It has failed to put recovery in place. The health committee heard testimony from the Pine River Institute, the only recovery facility in Ontario for young people. There is a wait time of 18 months, which is not an uncommon story. We hear time and again in Ottawa that there are multiple safe injection sites, but no treatment beds are available and there is a six-month wait.
If an addict decides that his or her life has hit rock bottom and wants to get off drugs, he or she cannot get treatment across the country. This is a huge issue. I know that the government has been busy signing onto agreements with the provinces and talking about money that has yet to flow. However, it is year four, and thousands of Canadians are dying. We really have to ramp up the effort to get that put in place and look at other solutions.
Another solution we have not really implemented is looking at pharmacists. They could be the gatekeepers in this whole solution. They can see when someone is being prescribed a large amount of opioids or has a lot of repeats of prescriptions, and if they feel there may be a concern, they could raise a flag. I think there is something to be done there as well.
I have seen some interesting examples of success stories. I went to the two-day symposium on opioids the health minister talked about. There was an example from, I believe, the Blood reserve. At the start, 40% of the people on that reserve were addicted to opioids. There was a nurse practitioner there who took the training for Suboxone treatment to get people off drugs and put everyone who was addicted on the plan, and within a two-year period, they began to see the dosage reduced for many of them. The community came alongside and provided counselling for those who had mental health issues and needed counselling. It provided jobs and job training for those who needed to work. There were rides to school, etc. The results were astounding. There was a reduction in the crime rate of 58%. Emergency calls at the hospital were down about 50% as well. Half the women no longer had their children being removed by children's aid. School attendance was up 33%.
It is a great example of how to get people off drugs by using that program and educating nurse practitioners to do the Suboxone treatment, which is apparently better than methadone treatment, because it is not as hard on the system and on people's teeth. This is a solution that worked and has been proven to work. It should be leveraged across the country, because indigenous people are disproportionately suffering in the opioid crisis, and we need to do something.
We have a number of safe injection sites in Vancouver and Toronto. This is how the lives that are saved are tracked. When someone has to be treated with Suboxone, that counts as a life that has been saved, because the person was going to overdose. However, that same person may come back the next day and the next day and have that same thing happen again. Eventually, he or she will inject somewhere that is not safe and will die. Therefore, this is not the permanent and long-term solution we need. The solution we need is to keep people from getting addicted to drugs in the first place by educating them about the harms and by reducing the supply of drugs. Then we need to help people get treatment and detoxification, which is under provincial jurisdiction, and into recovery. We need a lot more recovery facilities. For them to recover, we are also going to need to up mental health support. This country has a huge gap in the mental health supports that are available and affordable. We need to do something there if we really want to see the crisis averted.
If I had more time, I would go into some of the solutions that have been put in place in other places in the world. I was in Switzerland to see what was done there. It has moved away from supervised injection sites and has trained all its GPs in how to do methadone and Suboxone treatment so that it could increase its treatment capability very quickly without putting bricks and mortar in the ground at great expense and over a huge period of time. That is an idea we should be considering as well. We have heard people talk about the Portugal model. I think there is a lot to learn there.
We have to have a sense of urgency about this crisis. We cannot wait another four years. We have to act. We have to get treatment capability. We have to prevent the drugs from coming into the country and provide education for all.