Cocaine Is Atlantic Canada’s Silent Killer |
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Cocaine Is Atlantic Canada’s Silent Killer
Amid a global boom, the drug has become cheaper—and deadlier
Jeff Bourne knows from experience the devastation cocaine can cause. Now two decades sober, he grappled with drug and alcohol use before turning to recovery and dedicating his life to supporting others. In 2011, he and his wife Tammy started the U-Turn Drop-in Centre in Carbonear, a town of about 5,000 on Newfoundland’s Avalon Peninsula, as a service for people struggling with addiction. The centre has since grown to a staff of five, all with lived experiences of addiction. Over the years, they’ve supported thousands from the area and as far as St. John’s, an hour’s drive away. And although Bourne is used to being around cocaine, what he’s seeing now alarms him.
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There are, he says, “a lot more issues with mental health. People aren’t used to the potency of the drug. A lot of them come to us with psychosis.”
Fuelled by a changing market in high-potency cocaine and uncertainty around the make-up of illicit drugs, cocaine-related deaths in the region have spiked in the past few years. While Canada has been caught in the grips of a well-documented and much-publicized opioid toxicity crisis for some time, the harms caused by cocaine and other stimulants have increased mostly under the radar. Recent data suggests that Atlantic Canadians—especially in Newfoundland and Labrador—are being hit hard.
It’s perhaps no coincidence that the four Atlantic Canadian provinces also have among the highest rates of poverty in the country. Financial precarity is being compounded by a housing shortage that has pushed record numbers into living on the streets or in tent encampments springing up in communities across the region. That’s why, for Bourne and others on the front lines, the worrying rise in harms caused by cocaine is intricately connected to intersecting issues of housing access, food security, poverty, and mental health.
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The global cocaine trade is booming. According to a 2023 report from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, cocaine is the world’s fastest-growing illicit drug market, driven by a rise in global production and cheaper prices, mainly due to an increase in coca bush cultivation in Colombia. Much of the drug is bound for eager markets in Europe and North........