The above video and following story are excerpts from a Global News investigation called 'It's Murder': How lethal opioids are devastating a small region of Ontario
Story by Andrew Russell, Sam Cooper, Stewart Bell - Global News.
Six mothers from Simcoe County who lost children to accidental overdoses involving powerful opioids are calling for more community resources to deal with the opioid crisis and tougher sentences for criminals who choose to import drugs like fentanyl.
“They are murdering our loved ones,” said Melissa Hurst, who found her 19-year-old son, Luke, dead of an overdose on Mother’s Day 2017. “I wish to this day ... it would have been my life taken and that he could have had a longer life.”
The Simcoe-Muskoka area of Ontario has been devastated by powerful opioids like illicit fentanyl, where the overdose rate is significantly higher than the provincial average.
In 2017, the area saw the rate of emergency hospital visits for overdoses rise to 77.1 visits per 100,000 people, compared to a provincial rate of 54.6 visits, according to Public Health Ontario.
Between 2013 and 2017, deaths more than doubled to 81 a year.
