THUNDER BAY — Drug screening services are back in the city and will start to help paint the picture of street drug composition province-wide.
That’s according to both Juanita Lawson, the head of NorWest Community Health Centres, which has restarted substance testing as of Monday — this time using a mobile unit — after the forced closure of Path 525 at the end of March, and Karen McDonald, the director of the Toronto Drug Checking Service and the Ontario Drug Checking Community.
“Our hope is that we can set up at least one collection site in each of Ontario's public health unit jurisdictions,” McDonald said of her organization's strategies, adding that NorWest will play that role in the Thunder Bay health unit’s catchment area.
In addition to real-time local testing, clients of NorWest’s mobile drug testing unit will have the option to offer up a small sample of their supply which would be couriered to analysis sites in southern Ontario. McDonald said they’ve already got similar agreements with service providers in Kingston and Peterborough.
“What we hope is that some service users will be willing to forfeit a little bit of their sample, which would then be sent through our program to one of our analysis sites.”
McDonald, who is also a director at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, oversees a network of substance collection and analysis sites in the Ontario capital. Much like at NorWest’s mobile unit, people who are using can anonymously take their substances to a collection site to have it studied. However, in Toronto, people can have the option of forfeiting a small amount of their drugs so they can be sent to an analysis site (like a clinical or research laboratory) where they are examined in a more “granular” way than is typically available with on-site testing equipment, McDonald said.
That information is then reported back to the person and the collection site, and published on the group’s website.
“The results would be communicated with tailored strategies to reduce harm and referrals to drug-related health and social services,” McDonald said.
That will allow for more detailed analysis of what’s showing up in a given city’s supply, and, eventually McDonald said, across the province as more sites come on board.
“This is more like a part of a provincial effort and using more sensitive instrumentation so that we have a fuller picture,” McDonald said.
Toronto has collected about 18,000 samples since launching its service in 2019, McDonald said.
Front-line addictions recovery workers and public health officials have pointed to an increasingly dangerous illicit drug supply as a cause of the high opioid poisoning mortality rates in Thunder Bay and the region. According to the Thunder Bay District Health Unit, fentanyl was present in 90 per cent of 2024’s opioid overdose deaths (higher than the provincial average), and officials have told Newswatch that people may have been unknowingly consuming the drug when it was used to lace other substances.
Kyle Arnold, the program coordinator at P.A.C.E. (People Advocating for Change through Empowerment) and Long Lake 58 First Nation’s community support worker specializing in addictions, said other additives like cow deworming medications and animal tranquilizers are also showing up.
Data collected by NorWest itself, from when Path 525 was offering drug screening, also shows a litany of substances it classified as either drugs or cutting agents.
“You can still look at the coroner's report and people are dying across the province, they’re dying across Canada,” Lawson said of the importance of taking additional steps, like working with McDonald’s organizations. “So, this is something we want to use as a tool for advocacy and to raise awareness, but also … making sure that people are, again, safe in terms of what's going on.”
“Essentially, what we're trying to do is build out a provincial, what we call, a community-led drug market monitoring program,” McDonald said. “These are people who use drugs, donating their drugs for the greater good of community understanding what it is that's circulating.”
“What we have learned is that that data and information is being applied by many groups outside of people who use drugs,” she said, adding that includes clinicians, first responders and public health departments.
“Whatever it is that you're focused on — whether it's prevention, treatment, harm reduction, public safety — for all of those, you need to know what's circulating in the drug supply,” McDonald said.
Lawson said, when trying to keep people safe from the dangers of illicit drug use and addictions, teamwork is common, and essential.
“We see a lot of collaboration because we know that working and uniting together is necessary and we can't afford to not do that.”
Updated for clarity
