The Government of Alberta recently updated the Alberta substance use surveillance system, an online tool they released in 2020 to track data regarding drug and alcohol use in the province.
The update includes third quarter 2024 data for deaths and supervised consumption site usage.
In this article, I break down the stats for deaths, EMS responses, and SCS usage during the third quarter of 2024, compare them to previous years, and see if there’s a correlation between SCS usage and the rate of deaths and EMS responses.
Deaths
During the third quarter of 2024, 7 people had been reported to have died from “drug poisoning”. That’s down from the 18 that occurred in the second quarter.
Here’s how the third quarter’s death numbers compare to those of previous years.
After skyrocketing in 2023, thrid quarter drug deaths fell significantly this year. That being said, they’re still higher than all but one of the years the SCS was operational (2018–2020).
During the previous third quarter, Lethbridge had the highest number of drug-related deaths it had seen in any third quarter since the province began tracking data in 2016.
The next highest was 15, set in the third quarter of 2020, and that’s about 65% of what we saw last year.
Now, let’s break the quarter numbers by month.
The third quarter of 2024 saw a drop in the number of drug deaths because two of the months—July and September—in that quarter saw lower numbers of drug deaths. In each of those months, only 1 death was reported.
Here’s the rate of drug-related deaths per 100,000 person years for September 2024 among the cities Alberta’s reporting tool includes:
| Medicine Hat | 67.4 |
| Edmonton | 34.8 |
| Fort McMurray | 28.6 |
| Red Deer | 20.6 |
| Calgary | 16.2 |
| Lethbridge | 11.6 |
| Grande Prairie | 0.0 |
During the third quarter, Lethbridge had the third highest rate of drug deaths per 100,000 person years of the 7 cities tracked by the province’s system, driven primarily by having the highest rate in the province in August.
| Jul 2024 | Aug 2024 | Sep 2024 | Q3 2024 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Edmonton | 53.3 | 57.6 | 34.8 | 48.6 |
| Medicine Hat | 16.8 | 0 | 67.4 | 28.1 |
| Lethbridge | 11.6 | 57.8 | 11.6 | 27.0 |
| Calgary | 20.3 | 17.9 | 16.2 | 18.1 |
| Red Deer | 10.3 | 20.6 | 20.6 | 17.2 |
| Fort McMurray | 14.3 | 0 | 28.6 | 14.3 |
| Grande Prairie | 15.1 | 0 | 0 | 5.0 |
Now let’s look at the number of deaths in 2024 in relation to total annual deaths over the previous 8 years.
In 2023, we had the highest number of drug deaths since 2016, continuing a worrying trend of record deaths in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
We have data for only 9 months of 2024, but we’re currently on track to have fewer deaths than last year. If drug-related deaths continue at their current rate, we can expect to see 52 deaths by the end of the year, less than half of what we saw last year.
That being said, they’d still be higher than every year prior to 2021.
We averaged 4.3 drug-related deaths a month during the first 9 months of 2024. Last year, the average was 10.0, which itself was higher than the average of 6.6 in 2022, 5.6 in 2021, and 4.0 in 2020.
And remember, these are just deaths that have been certified by the medical examiner. It’s possible the number of deaths could’ve been even higher.
In September 2020, the Lethbridge supervised consumption site, which had been run by ARCHES, closed its doors following the UCP government’s refusal to renew funding.
With third quarter data for 2024, we have another 12-month period of data to compare to how things were prior to the SCS closing.
During the first 12 months after the SCS had closed (September 2020 to August 2021), 46 people died from drug poisoning in Lethbridge.
Here’s how that same period (September through August) compares to previous and subsequent years.
That 2020–2021 period had the highest number of drug-related deaths compared to similar periods going back to 2016–2017. But we easily surpassed that record the following year. We were just 4 deaths away from doubling the first year’s numbers.
In the third full year since the SCS was shut down, we see that drug-related deaths increased even more, rising to 119 between September 2022 and August 2023. That’s a 35% increase over 2021–2022 and 159% increase over 2020–2021.
This also means that we surpassed 200 drug-related deaths—253 to be precise—since the SCS was shut down due to government defunding.
However, in the fourth year since the closure—September 2023 to August 2024—deaths dropped dramatically to just 64. That’s almost half of the previous 12-month period’s numbers= and the second lowest since the closure.
Here’s a look at Lethbridge’s average monthly deaths for the September–August period.
Even though deaths have dropped dramatically since the previous September–August period, last year’s period still had the third highest average number of deaths since September 2016.
EMS responses
During the third quarter of 2024, the number of calls Lethbridge EMS responded to had increased compared to the second quarter, driven by a huge spike in July.
In fact, July’s numbers were the highest the city has seen since August 2023, almost a year prior. And even then, the two months were tied at 33.
Here’s a look at all the months on record.
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan | 14 | 25 | 10 | 14 | 40 | 44 | 3 |
| Feb | 39 | 17 | 8 | 23 | 41 | 49 | 12 |
| Mar | 19 | 13 | 14 | 43 | 17 | 33 | 22 |
| Apr | 41 | 12 | 15 | 14 | 12 | 39 | 25 |
| May | 38 | 16 | 20 | 28 | 12 | 43 | 11 |
| Jun | 35 | 20 | 49 | 27 | 21 | 39 | 13 |
| Jul | 35 | 28 | 56 | 52 | 23 | 44 | 33 |
| Aug | 24 | 10 | 42 | 49 | 24 | 33 | 10 |
| Sep | 18 | 16 | 14 | 35 | 21 | 18 | 15 |
| Oct | 28 | 10 | 15 | 32 | 29 | 12 | |
| Nov | 28 | 16 | 38 | 43 | 39 | 20 | |
| Dec | 21 | 13 | 20 | 22 | 28 | 29 |
The third quarter of 2024 was the second lowest second quarter on record, as well as the ninth lowest quarter overall since the start of 2018, with EMS responding to 58 drug-related events.
| 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Q1 | 72 | 55 | 32 | 80 | 98 | 126 | 37 |
| Q2 | 114 | 48 | 84 | 69 | 45 | 121 | 49 |
| Q3 | 77 | 54 | 112 | 136 | 68 | 95 | 58 |
| Q4 | 77 | 39 | 73 | 97 | 96 | 61 |
As well, during the 12 months since the SCS closed down in August 2020, Lethbridge saw 337 opioid-related events that EMS have responded to. This was the highest number of such events during the same period over the previous 3 years.
| Sep 2018–Aug 2019 | 236 |
| Sep 2019–Aug 2020 | 269 |
| Sep 2020–Aug 2021 | 337 |
| Sep 2021–Aug 2022 | 322 |
| Sep 2022–Aug 2023 | 441 |
| Sep 2023–Aug 2024 | 208 |
Between September 2021 and August 2022, EMS responded to 322 events, passing the 2018–2019 year and 2019–2020 year. That averages out to about 26.8 per month.
And then during the period between September 2022 and August 2023, that number increased to a new record, with Lethbridge EMS responding to 441 drug-related event, an average of 36.8 per month.
This past year, however, that number dropped to its lowest level since September 2018, to just 208 events, less than half of what it was in the previous 12-month period. That’s an average of 17.3 per month or just 4 per week.
Which brings us to our next dataset.
SCS usage
Technically speaking, Lethbridge isn’t completely absent of any supervised consumption facilities. The UCP chose to replace the 21-seat (13 injection, 8 inhalation) supervised consumption site with a remodeled RV that has 3 seats. And that’s just for injection. It has no inhalation capacity, unlike the defunded SCS location.
And are deaths and EMS responses down last year because of the UCP recovery-only approach? Well, let’s take a look at SCS usage.
During the third quarter of 2024, the mobile SCS van saw 13,271 visits. Here’s how that compares to the third quarter in previous years.
The number of SCS visits increased during the third quarter of 2021 but it dropped in the third quarter of both 2022 and 2023. But now we’re back up again. In fact, the third quarter of 2024 has the highest number of SCS visits in Lethbridge of any quarter since 2022.
Which is interesting, given how much drug deaths has decreased. But more on that in just a bit.
The number of unique visitors per month, on the other hand, is at its highest level of any third quarter since 2021 and the second highest quarter overall on record.
Let’s take a look at average visits per visitor.
See what I mean?
So, while the number of visitors increased in the third quarter of 2024, the highest number in any third quarter, the average number of visits each person makes to the SCS van has increased only slightly. Even though more people are visiting it than a year ago, those who are using it do so only a bit more frequently.
How SCS usage affects everything else
Now that we have all that data on the table, what relationships can we draw? Well, we can look at the difference in deaths and EMS responses when SCS usage is high and when it’s low to see if there is any sort of connection between the three.
Here’s the number of deaths:
Here’s the number of EMS responses:
What we see in these charts is that the more supervised consumption services are used in Lethbridge, the fewer substance-related deaths and EMS responses.
The higher the number of visits to the Lethbridge supervised consumption site, the lower the number of deaths and EMS responses. And the reverse is also true: as visits dropped, deaths and EMS responses increased.
And the relationship is very pronounced, as seen by the red trend lines in those four charts.
That wasn’t quite the same for the number of visitors: the relationship between the number of visitors seemed to have little effect on deaths or EMS.
However, the frequency at which the average visitor used the SCS had an inverse relationship with both death and EMS responses. The more often the average visitor used the SCS, the lower the number of deaths and EMS responses, and like the first usage stats, the reverse was also true.
These new numbers add four more years of data to confirm the conclusion I made in 2020 that there is a relationship between SCS utilization and drug death numbers.
It shouldn’t be that surprising that both drug-relates deaths and EMS responses to drug events decreased this past year, considering that more people are using the available supervised consumption services.
