Medical experts urge Canada to declare public emergency over opioid crisis
OTTAWA — Canada should declare a national public health emergency over its deadly opioid crisis, health care experts urged Friday as the perils of addiction, overdose and death came under the microscope in Ottawa.
The country with the second-highest per capita prescription drug rates in the world now faces a situation so dire it demands a response at the highest levels of government, said Dr. David Juurlink, head of pharmacology and toxicology at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre.
Politicians gathered with public health experts, doctors and advocates — many of them ordinary Canadians who have lost loved ones to drugs — during Day 1 of a two-day summit in Ottawa aimed at hashing out possible solutions.
Donna May, whose daughter Jac was 35 when she died of a drug overdose, said she supports calls to declare an emergency.