THUNDER BAY -- A pair of weekend drug overdoses has left two men in hospital in the intensive care unit.
Thunder Bay Police Service officers responded to two calls on Saturday, including one where they seized a powdered substance that produced a potentially dangerous chemical reaction at the Balmoral Street station.
The first was a call to an unconscious 25-year-old male at a north-side hotel, where he was rushed to the Thunder Bay Regional Health Sciences Centre. They discovered he had allegedly been using more than one illicit drug prior to the overdose.
Three hours later officers responded to a call of an unwanted person on Cameron Street and found a 27-year-old man at the corner of May and Cameron streets. He was incoherent and was taken to hospital under the powers of the Mental Health Act.
During a subsequent search the officers found a suspicious powder, which produced the release of an unknown gas during routine testing.
“It causes a great deal of concern because we’re not sure what that chemical was,” police spokesman Chris Adams said on Sunday.
“It was a preliminary test being conducted here and it certainly caused quite a concern because these chemical reactions can be quite caustic.”
Thunder Bay Fire Rescue was called and an officer exposed to the substance has sought medical attention as a precaution.
Further testing will need to be conducted to determine the exact nature of the substance and it’s too early to determine if the two incidents are related.
“Right now it’s just coincidental but there could be a possible connection,” Adams said.
“It’s very difficult to tell the origin of the drugs, especially when they’re purchased at the street level. The latter one is obviously a big concern to us as well because one of our own officers was at risk.”
Adams added members of the public, as well as emergency responders, need to exercise extreme caution when dealing with street drugs.
Without proper testing, it’s nearly impossible to determine if dangerous additives are present in a substance.
“Very often drug traffickers will cut down a drug to try to get more mileage out of it and more money out of it,” Adams said. “In the case of a lot of these drugs the production of them can be very dangerous as well.”
