A machine used for chemical analysis, bearing a slight resemblance to a printer, vibrated repeatedly as technicians at a drug testing site in Victoria, British Columbia, prepared to open its doors to local drug users.
Most samples delivered Drug controla lab led by researchers at the University of Victoria, found it contained fentanyl, the synthetic opioid causing deadly overdoses in the province at record levels.
Alarm about the spread of fentanyl is echoed in the way Canada and the United States talk about the opioid crisis. But in Mexico, the government has repeatedly denied that fentanyl abuse is spreading beyond its border and said the problem is unique to its northern neighbors.
Poor detection efforts, in public health settings or during investigations of drug deaths, have meant that the extent of fentanyl in Mexico is largely an open question.
“We don’t know, because we’re not looking for it,” said Xóchitl Cárdenas, a forensic services chemist at the attorney general’s office in Sonora state, along Mexico’s northern border, where experts say the fentanyl crisis it is acute.
Ms. Cárdenas was one of a dozen forensic scientists, medical researchers and Mexican government workers who traveled to Vancouver and Victoria this week to find out how Canadian agencies are responding to the supply of toxic drugs. She watched Pablo Gonzalez, a graduate student who runs the lab, list the capabilities of the drug analysis software developed by the university, which can provide drug test results in less than 30 minutes.
This week I traveled with the group as members visited some of the places where drug users can receive services, including kiosks they can use to inject substances under the supervision of health workers, group meetings that offer counseling for complaints, and pharmacies who dispense therapeutic medications for patients with opioid use disorder.
The Mexican visitors’ trip to Canada was sponsored by the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. In February, the bureau organized a similar tour of a “body farm” in Colorado, a site where Mexican medical examiners have observed how decomposing corpses can be tested for fentanyl poisoning.
Natalie Kitroeff, my colleague who runs the Times’ Mexico City bureau, reported on that visit, which U.S. State Department officials hoped would further their diplomatic goal of holding a mirror up to Mexico’s fentanyl crisis.
Canada is an important partner in addressing the opioid crisis across the region, said Alex Thurn, deputy director of the embassy office.
“The strides Canada has made in this fight are truly impressive,” Thurn told me, adding that his group hoped to bring the study tour full circle with an invitation for Canadian and American experts to visit northern Mexico.
The trip came as political tensions have erupted in Canada over British Columbia’s experimental approach to reducing opioid deaths by decriminalizing possession of small amounts of the drug for personal use.
[Read: Canada Decriminalizes Opioids and Other Drugs in British Columbia]
Public health and policy experts we spoke with on Vancouver’s downtown east side, a neighborhood considered ground zero of the opioid crisis, said decriminalization was in fact in place long before it officially began in January 2023. They told us said police often used their discretion in making arrests, but they still seized drugs, which usually sent drug users running to unsafe options to satisfy their addiction. For those arrested, withdrawal symptoms in prison could have dangerous consequences.
David Eby, premier and leader of the New Democratic Party, has come under increasing pressure ahead of October’s provincial election to address the problem of public drug use and last week announced he was seeking to effectively shut down the experiment in half of its planned three-year period. race of the year. To do this requires authorization from the federal health department, which approved the experiment.
Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, seized on the issue of drug decriminalization this week to attack Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. On Tuesday he called Trudeau a “lunatic” in a biting exchange during a question-and-answer period that ended with his temporary expulsion from the House of Commons for using unparliamentary language.
Toxic overdoses are the leading cause of death in the largest segment of British Columbia’s population, those aged 10 to 59. They kill more people than homicides, suicides, accidents and natural diseases combined, according to the coroner’s office, and have caused more than 14,000 deaths in the province since 2016.
While politicians have backtracked on the issue, the main difference between the drug situations in the two countries is, as the Mexican visitors pointed out, the Canadian government’s broad availability of funding to address the dangers of opioids.
“We have no government support,” said Lourdes Angulo, director of Verter, a nonprofit that offers services to drug users in Mexicali, the capital of the northern border state of Baja California.
“Sometimes we fear for our safety because the government is always looking for something to stop our organization from doing what we do,” he said.
For experts like Ms. Cárdenas, the Sonoran chemist, the experience of walking through homeless encampments along the streets of Vancouver and Victoria, where outreach workers make their rounds with naloxone kits to reverse overdoses, has given a new meaning to the results he would look for in the laboratory.
“It gives me a different perception of what drugs are like on the streets,” he said.
TransCanada
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Police in Surrey, British Columbia, have announced the arrest of three men in the investigation into the murder of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh nationalist and temple president.
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In a guest essay for the Times, author Stephen Marche argues that public opinion about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership has weakened in the face of Canada’s growing polarization.
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For the first time in a decade, three Premier League teams – Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City – are taking part in the championship as it enters its final weeks. Shawna Richer, an editor who works on sports coverage in America, followed soccer fans to a Toronto bar.
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Scaachi Koul, a Canadian cultural writer, reflects on how watching episodes of “Indian Idol” with her family helped provide some respite during her mother’s cancer diagnosis.
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“Self-Portrait,” a documentary made using surveillance footage collected by Canadian filmmaker Joële Walinga, is one of five international films streaming now, writes Devika Girish.
Vjosa Isai is a journalist and researcher for the New York Times in Toronto.
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