“They’re using at home, alone, where they could overdose and die.” “Those people didn’t just stop doing drugs,” Mary said. Last week, Mary said, less than 10 per cent of CACTUS’ regular clients were using on-site. Intravenous drug users are afraid of going outdoors after 8 p.m. The overdose crisis has been exacerbated by another factor, Quebec’s province-wide curfew. That jumped to one overdose every day in the past few months.” “We used to see an overdose a week on our premises. Fentanyl was going to hit our streets sooner or later and it has. “But exceptions don’t stay exceptions for long. “For years, Quebec had somehow managed to avoid the fentanyl crisis that hit the rest of North America,” said Jean-François Mary, executive director of the CACTUS Montreal safe injection site. The inside scoop in your inbox, every Friday. SUPPORT THE ROVER If you’d like to see more journalism like this, sign up for The Rover, a newsletter-supported reporting project brought to you by Christopher Curtis and Ricochet Media.
The arrival of heroin around Atwater Ave., Cabot Square and the surrounding blocks has coincided with another crisis - drugs cut with the synthetic opioid fentanyl. Over the Christmas holiday, a young man who stayed at the nearby Welcome Hall Mission overdosed. Last fall, two clients at Resilience Montreal died with injection opiates into their bloodstream. a place known as the epicentre of Montreal’s open air heroin trade.īut harder drugs have migrated west in recent months. Not that long ago, overdoses were something that happened dozens of blocks east on Berri St. “Her boyfriend came knocking at my door after midnight, she was overdosing,” Isaac said. They had holed up in a motel somewhere among the garages and machine shops that dot Saint Jacques St.
Isaac was staying in a room across from Amanda on Sunday. The other folk who frequent the west downtown shelter walked past the lumbering man, patting Isaac’s back before hopping over a puddle and onto Atwater Ave. Tears streamed down his face as he spoke about Amanda, a woman he calls his “adopted sister.” Isaac stood on a sidewalk outside Resilience Montreal Wednesday, shifting between dejection and rage, trying his best to make sense of another senseless death. “You never know what’s going on in a person’s life, you never know what pushed them to end up where they did.”
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