Our country is experiencing an opioid crisis, partly because illicit drugs don’t come with an ingredients list. However, we can supply one. In partnership with BC’s Interior Health, the AIDS Network Kootenay Outreach and Support Society, and the British Columbia Centre on Substance Use, Shahrukh Alvi, Akash Dhatavkar, Binal Patel and I examined data collected during drug checking services to see what could be learned regarding the substances that are being sold on the market and service user behaviour.

More and more, statistics  are being used to summarize information about our complex world. Whether it’s epidemiologists reporting on COVID-19 or an HR assistant telling us which employees we should be disciplining, when someone processes the data – and does it well – it can be quite useful. But number crunching doesn’t automatically give us accurate or useful results.

In 2019, Statistics Canada suggested that Canada’s opioid crisis is partly fuelled by prescriptions. When researching this in January of 2020, Sofia Bahmutsky, Yuening Li, and I were not able to find data to substantiate this, so we turned to US data to look for evidence of a relationship between opioid deaths and opioid prescriptions. We found that both opioid prescriptions and opioid-related deaths are increasing, but their exact relationship, and the best way to address the problem, remains perplexing.