Media Releases

A smart way to cut overdose deaths: Editorial

July 12, 2016

Med­ical experts across Cana­da and the Unit­ed States have been sound­ing loud warn­ings for the past few years about the explo­sion of deaths relat­ed to over­dos­ing on opi­oid-relat­ed drugs. Now there’s new evi­dence about the dis­pro­por­tion­ate impact on one spe­cif­ic group — recent­ly released pris­on­ers. The evi­dence comes from a study car­ried out by researchers at St. Michael’s Hos­pi­tal and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Toron­to. They found that a tenth of adults in Ontario who died of a drug over­dose between 2006 and 2013 had been inmates in a provin­cial jail with­in one year of their death. Read more.