Barton Jail Overdoses

Inmates at the Barton jail are overdosing on drugs that are making their way inside, despite the security measures in place, but those overdoses are not being tracked by the province.

CHCH put in a freedom of information request, where we asked for overdose statistics at the jail but received a response from the ministry saying it couldn’t provide them because those stats don’t exist.

They said overdoses are not tracked in a centralised database and they would have to do an extensive and costly search of each inmate’s health file. Telling us that would take more than 9 000 hours and $300 000 to do it.

Only the overdose deaths are tracked and that is through coroners inquests. The jail’s healthcare manager was asked to provide stats to that inquest around the number of times Naloxone was administered to get an idea of the number of overdoses but said she wasn’t able to get that information either.

The manager of corporate healthcare for the ministry says they are at least 2 years out from an electronic system and there needs to be better options for tracking the healthcare of inmates.

Some have argued that without these stats there’s no real way to gauge the drug problem inside. The inquest has heard that the number of overdoses at Barton jail are growing and we learned that by the end of this month Naloxone will be available for all correctional staff to use. Right now it’s just healthcare and sergeants that have access.