Health-care officials warn of street drugs in Hamilton tainted with tranquilizers

A new drug combination on the streets of Hamilton is causing a major concern for health care professionals in the city.

Doctors and paramedics are seeing more cases of people overdosing on opioids laced with animal tranquilizers.

It’s too soon to get hard data about how many people have overdosed on the tainted drugs, but healthcare workers told CHCH News that the tranquilizers make it impossible to treat overdoses the usual way.

There’s a new drug concoction on the streets of Hamilton that is sparking concern among doctors and paramedics.

“It’s a really significant health concern,” said Dr. Robin Lennox, an addiction physician. “This drug is a veterinary tranquilizer — at any time adding it is not meant for human consumption.”

WATCH MORE: Niagara recovery centre co-founder calls local opioid overdose surge ‘heartbreaking’

Lennox says an alarming number of people are overdosing on opioids mixed with the tranquilizer, and it requires a more advanced level of treatment than a regular overdose.

“Naloxone cannot reverse the tranquilizer when someone is overdosing, it can only reverse the opioid component of whatever is in their drug, but this tranquilizer will persist, so someone may need to be monitored for many hours,” said Lennox. “They may need breathing support, they would likely need to go to a hospital to get care.”

While it’s too early to track how many people have died because of the deadly mixture, the signs are there that it’s a problem.

“What I can say is we are seeing a really high volume of ambulance calls for complicated overdose of ER visits, of hospitalizations,” said Lennox. “All of those are indicators that this drug supply is particularly toxic, and dangerous to people.”

READ MORE: Ontario’s medical regulator approves changes to prescribing safer supply drugs

“What we are seeing is that we are having a high number of calls related to overdose,” said Hamilton EMS Superintendent Nicole Saunders. “By looking at our numbers in September, we had 187 calls that paramedics responded to that were a result from a drug overdose.”

While people overdosing on tranquilizer-laced opioids require treatment in the intensive care unit, it’s a problem for paramedics responding to the 911 call.

“Narcan (naloxone) is not effective when we are dealing with tranquilizers, because the way that the system works is different,” said Saunders. “So it does make it a lot more complex to be able to care for a patient that has a tranquilizer in their system as well.”

Some of the signs that show that you’ve taken a tranquilizer include decreased respiration, lower blood pressure, hallucinations and unconsciousness, and doctors say the mixture will lead to higher rates of fatal overdoses.

To put into perspective how often paramedics deal with overdoses, they only make up to 2 per cent of overall 9-1-1 calls, but that number is slowly climbing.

WATCH MORE: Hamilton’s opioid overdose calls exceed the monthly record for July: city reports