898 Albertans died from drug overdoses in first seven months of 2021

Oct 8, 2021 | 2:14 PM

LETHBRIDGE, AB – Alberta’s opioid crisis continues to wage on.

The provincial government has updated the Alberta Substance Use Surveillance Report, which keeps track of information related to illicit drug use.

Between January and July 2021, 898 people in the province succumbed to overdoses, which is up from 729 in the same period in 2020 and 516 in 2019.

116 of those occurred in July 2021, meaning there was a rate of 30.8 deaths per 100,000 residents.

The South Zone lost 84 lives up to and including July with the most recent month seeing 35 people losing their lives. In July, the region had an overdose fatality rate of 23.9.

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There were 32 drug poisoning deaths so far this year in Lethbridge with only one of those happening in July.

In the city, 57 per cent of deaths in the second quarter took place in the person’s private residence, 29 per cent in someone else’s home, seven per cent occurred in a public place, and another seven per cent in an “other facility.”

Men aged 35-39 were the most heavily impacted provincially.

Across the South Zone, substance use lead to 1,490 admissions to hospital in Q2 2021.

During that same timeframe, the AHS-operated Overdose Prevention Site in Lethbridge was visited 13,020 times, a far cry from the 66,168 visits that the now-former Supervised Consumption Site saw in Q4 2019.

You can view the full Alberta Substance Use Surveillance Report here.

by David Opinko