A recent CBC article authored by Naama Weingarten and Kate McGillivray examined Ontario’s lack of supervised inhalation sites despite a growing shift from injection to smoking among drug users. According to health experts, Ontario is far behind in protecting the increasing number of individuals in the province who are choosing to inhale opioids rather than inject them.
“There is some evidence that … the rate at which the drugs accumulate in the blood is slower with smoking than it is with injecting, which allows people to control the amount of drug that they’re taking in more precisely,” said Dr. Ahmed Bayoumi, who has been evaluating the health implications of the shift towards inhalation at the MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions in St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.
Data from the Ontario Office of the Chief Coroner demonstrates that in 2024, only 4% of deadly opioid overdoses are thought to have been caused by injection alone, which represents a decrease of 20% recorded in 2018. According to the analysis carried out by the Office of the Chief Coroner, inhalation of opioids is linked to 40% of fatal overdoses recorded last year, corresponding to an increase from 18% in 2018.
“We know what we need to help support people who smoke their drugs — and we’ve been really, really behind the curve on it,” said Gillian Kolla, an assistant professor of medicine at Memorial University, who studies drug use across Canada in her interview with CBC News. We have multiple sources of data that are telling us about this,” she told CBC Toronto.
“We can see it when we talk to harm reduction programs that distribute equipment to people who use drugs,” she added. “And when we talk to people who use drugs about how their use is changing, they are also talking about how they have been moving more towards smoking.”
Currently, Ontario’s only supervised inhalation booth is located at Casey House in Toronto. It opened in late 2022 as part of the hospital’s supervised consumption services and offers a small, ventilated room where clients can safely smoke unregulated substances under trained supervision.
Health advocates continue to call for funding for supervised inhalation and injection sites, especially after the Ford government closed nine supervised drug sites and replaced them with “HART Hubs,” which offer broader social and health services. In 2024, approximately 2,200 Ontarians died of opioid-related causes in 2024, which is three times higher compared to thirty years ago.
