A machine used for chemical analysis, bearing a slight resemblance to a printer, beeped repeatedly as technicians at a drug testing site in Victoria, British Columbia, prepared to open its doors to local drug users.
Most of the samples given to Substance Drug Checking, a lab run by researchers at the University of Victoria, were found to contain fentanyl, the synthetic opioid causing fatal overdoses in the province at record levels.
Alarm about the spread of fentanyl is rooted 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 has claimed that the problem is unique to its northern neighbors.
Weak detection efforts, in public health settings or during drug death investigations, have meant that the extent of fentanyl’s reach 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 the state of Sonora, on Mexico’s northern border, where experts say the fentanyl crisis is acute.
Ms. Cardenas was one of a dozen Mexican forensic scientists, medical investigators and government workers who traveled to Vancouver and Victoria this week to learn how Canadian agencies are responding to the supply of toxic drugs. She watched as Pablo González, a graduate student who runs the lab, listed the capabilities of the drug testing software the university is developing, which can generate drug test results in less than 30 minutes.
I traveled with the group this week as members visited some of the sites where drug users can receive services, including booths they can use to inject substances under the supervision of health care staff, group meetings that offer grief counseling, and pharmacies that dispense therapeutic medications for patients suffering from opioid use disorder.
The trip of Mexican visitors to Canada was sponsored by the Office of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs of the United States Embassy in Mexico. In February, the office hosted a similar tour of a “body farm” in Colorado, a site where Mexican medical examiners 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 advance their diplomatic goal of holding a mirror 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 progress Canada has made in this fight is very impressive,” Thurn told me, adding that his group hoped to complete its study tour with an invitation for Canadian and American experts to visit northern Mexico.
The trip came as political tensions 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]
Policy and public health experts we spoke to on Vancouver’s downtown east side, a neighborhood considered ground zero for the opioid crisis, said de facto decriminalization had been in place long before it officially began in January. 2023. We were told that police often used their discretion when making arrests, but still confiscated drugs, commonly leading users to seek unsafe options to satisfy their addictions. For those arrested, withdrawal symptoms in prison could have dangerous results.
David Eby, Premier and leader of the New Democratic Party, has been under increasing pressure ahead of October’s provincial election to address public drug use and announced last week that he was looking to effectively shut down that experiment by about half. of his expected three-year term. current year. Doing so requires authorization from the federal health department, which approved the experiment.
Pierre Poilievre, the federal Conservative leader, used the issue of drug decriminalization this week to attack Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He called Trudeau “crazy” in a scathing exchange during a question-and-answer period Tuesday that ended with him being temporarily expelled from the House of Commons for using unparliamentary language.
Drug overdoses from toxic substances are the leading cause of death among the majority of British Columbia’s population, between 10 and 59 years old. 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.
Although politicians backtracked on the issue, a major difference between the drug situation in the two countries is, as Mexican visitors noted, the broad availability of Canadian government funding to address the dangers of opioids.
“We have no support from the government,” 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 own safety because the government is always looking for something to prevent our organization from doing what we do,” he said.
For experts like Ms. Cardenas, the Sonoran chemist, the experience of walking through homeless encampments along the streets of Vancouver and Victoria, where community workers make their rounds with naloxone kits to reverse overdoses, gives her it gave new meaning to the results I would seek. at the laboratory.
“It gives me a different perception of what drugs are like on the streets,” he said.
Trans Canada
-
Police in Surrey, British Columbia, announced the arrest of three men in the investigation into the shooting of Hardeep Singh Nijjar, a Sikh nationalist and temple president.
-
In a guest essay for The Times, author Stephen Marche argues that public opinion of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s leadership has softened in the face of Canada’s growing polarization.
-
For the first time in a decade, three Premier League teams (Arsenal, Liverpool and Manchester City) are in the Championship as it enters its final weeks. Shawna Richer, an editor who covers sports in the United States, followed the soccer fans to a bar in Toronto.
-
Scaachi Koul, a Canadian cultural writer, reflects on how watching episodes of “Indian Idol” with her family helped give her respite during her mother’s cancer diagnosis.
-
“Self-Portrait,” a documentary made from surveillance footage collected by Canadian filmmaker Joële Walinga, is one of five international films now streaming, writes Devika Girish.
Vjosa Isai is a reporter and researcher for the New York Times in Toronto.
How are we doing?
We look forward to hearing from you about this newsletter and events in Canada in general. Send them to nytcanada@nytimes.com.
Do you like this email?
Forward it to your friends and let them know they can sign up here.