Belleville, Ont., set to declare state of emergency due to spike in drug overdoses

The calls began coming in at around 2:30 Tuesday afternoon. People were overdosing in downtown Belleville, Ont., after consuming drugs.

"I saw five go down like boom, boom, boom, boom," says a man named Steve. He was arriving to the Bridge Street United Church, which offers drop-in services for the city's homeless, when he say people started collapsing on the ground.

• The information you need to know, sent directly to you: Download the CTV News App

"Between when they inhaled and when they went down, I put a high-end of five minutes," he recalls.

Over the course of one hour, emergency services responded to 13 overdoses, all within a few blocks. This prompted police to put out an alert warning the public to "exercise caution and avoid unnecessary travel" to the downtown core.

By Wednesday morning, the total number of suspected overdoses had climbed to 16. None of them was fatal.

Belleville Mayor Neil Ellis says the city will declare a state of emergency Thursday, hoping to unlock more support and funding from the provincial government.

"We can't afford to fix it ourselves," he told CTV News. "It's a crisis. It's a medical crisis and a health crisis. And resources from the province and the feds have got to go toward trying to solve this."

This is not the first time Belleville has struggled with a spike in overdoses. In November, there were 90 suspected overdoses in one week, with one of them fatal.

Ellis says an increase in housing for those experiencing homeless will help, but acknowledges there's no easy solution.

"The best case is housing first and wraparound services," he says. "It's not going to cure everybody but that's the gold standard."

Toxic supply

What's happening in Belleville is taking place in cities and towns across the country.

In British Columbia, there were 2,511 suspected overdose deaths in 2023, a five per cent increase from the year before and the most ever recorded in the province. In Toronto, paramedics responded to 25 fatal calls for suspected opioid overdoses in December 2023. Ottawa Public Health says there were 22 suspected overdose deaths last month alone.

Contributing to opioid overdose deaths is a drug supply becoming increasingly more toxic, with drugs often laced with fentanyl, carfentanil and animal tranquilizers.

"Right now, we are seeing tranquilizers which are used for elephants called Xylazine in the drugs," says Derrick St. John, who works at Ottawa's Sand Hill Community Health Centre.

"Xylazine decreases the blood flow to limbs, so we are seeing people with really bad wounds," he says. In some cases, those wounds can be so bad that limbs need to be amputated.

Clients at Sandy Hill are able to bring their drug supply in for testing and St. John says Xylazine is showing up in one of every two or three samples taken.

"The drugs are getting worse," he says.

'It's devastating'

Todd Buchanan works with people struggling with addiction in Belleville and calls Tuesday's events "devastating."

"It could have been a lot worse," he says, grateful that no one died. "When an event like this happens in a community, my hope would be people take notice and not judge what happened but find ways so it doesn't happen again."

Buchanan wants to see new approaches taken by all levels of government to address this crisis, saying the current approach is clearly not working.

"(A solution) comes from the government's willingness to look outside the box and try and find solutions that may seem on the surface perhaps controversial," he says.

But those solutions may take years, which is too long for people like Steve. He is experiencing homelessness and watches as more and more friends fall victim to the opioid crisis. He says everything feels reactionary and not enough is being done to prevent what's happening.

"Not enough, not even touching it," he says. "They need to get ahead of it, because I'm telling ya, these people didn't come here that way."