More than 2,200 Ontarians died from opioids last year as numbers trend downward, data show

More than 2,200 Ontarians died from opioids last year as numbers trend downward, data show

The opioid crisis started to affect Ontario in 2015 and 2016 when illicit fentanyl made its way east from B.C.

More than 2,200 Ontarians died from opioids last year, a 15 per cent decrease from 2023, newly released data from the Office of the Chief Coroner shows.

“What goes through my head is a small degree of optimism in the fact that we have seen less people die last year, which is very good, but that’s within a context of 2,231 people dying last year,” Dr. Dirk Huyer, the chief coroner, told The Canadian Press in an interview.

His office had recorded 2,639 opioid deaths in 2023.

“I also have a degree of worry that this is a short interval, for whatever reason that we haven’t identified, and