Opioid crisis strikes 'close to home' for many, poll says

One in eight Canadian adultssays a family member or close friend has become "dependent on or addicted" to opioids in the last five years, an Angus Reidpollreleased on Thursday says.

The poll also suggests that even as public awareness of the devastating risk of addiction to opioid painkillers including oxycodone, hydromorphone, and fentanyl has risen, they are still regularly prescribed. One in five Canadian adults said they had personally been prescribed opioidsin the last five years.

The findings counter perceptions that the opioidcrisisis "a problem that's limited to marginalized people or poor people," Shachi Kurl, executive director of the Angus Reid Institute, told CBC News.

"It is really something that cuts across the entire spectrum of society, across, you know, different spectrums of the economy, of class, of education," Kurlsaid.

"This isn't a problem that [only] other people over there, across the street, on the other side of town are dealing with."

The number of opioid-related overdose deaths has continued to rise in the last few years, largely fuelled by the increased presence of fentanyl, a highly potent opioidthat has become increasingly present in street drugs such as heroin and cocaine. Users often don't know that they're even takingfentanyl.

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The Public Health Agency of Canada predictsthat the number of opioid-related overdose deaths for 2017 will surpass 4,000once the numbers are available from all provinces and territories. There were 2,861 such deaths reported in 2016.

The poll adds a broader perspective to the "heartbreaking, cautionary stories from families" that have been told in the media about how the opioidcrisis has affected them, Kurlsaid.

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"We've seenanecdotal evidence that 'yes it's happened to my kid, it's happened to my friend, my family member' but now we have some data-driven evidence of it," she said.

Dr. David Juurlink,head of clinical pharmacology and toxicology atSunnybrookHealth Sciences Centre in Toronto and a recognized opioidexpert, said he is "not at all surprised" at the number of people who reported that someone close to them was dependent on opioids.

"The drugs are just that ubiquitous in society," Juurlink said in an email to CBCNews.

"I'm even less surprised that onein fiveCanadians was prescribed an opioid in the past fiveyears," he said. "This is reflective of how common pain is, but also how much freer doctors are [with]opioids than we were 20 years ago.

"This change happened not because we had good studies to guide the practice. It happened because we were misled about the safety and effectiveness of opioids by pain specialists and the drug companies that paid them."

Juurlinkhas been actively involved in developing new guidelines to change the way Canadian physicians prescribe opioids and manage addiction, as the federal government tries to tackle opioidsas"a national public health crisis."

A possible limitation to the poll, he noted, is the fact that drug dependency "means different things to different people." Respondents were simply asked if any of their close friends or family members had "been dependent on or addicted to opiates," without providing a clinical definition of what that means.

It's possible the pervasiveness of the opioidproblem may be even larger than the poll results indicated, Kurlsaid, because a limitation in public opinion polling overall is the challenge ofreaching marginalizedpeople.

"If you're underhoused, if you don't have access to a telephone, if you don't have access to the internet, chances are, you know, you are going to be part of a bucket that is much harder to collect in terms of data," she said.

'Big divider' on injection sites

In addition to asking Canadians about their personal exposure to the opioidcrisis, the poll also asked for opinions on supervised consumptionsites, in which harm reduction workers or volunteers watch as people inject their drugs and medically intervene if they overdose. The facilities also ensure that drug users have clean supplies to prevent infection, and often provide other essentials, such as water, to people who need them.

Two out of three Canadians (67 per cent) are in favour of supervised consumption sites, the poll suggests.People of all ages (from 18 to over 55) and both women and men were about equally supportive.

But "the big divider" between thosewho supported supervised injection sites and those who were against them, Kurlsaid, was their political affiliation.

People who supported the Conservative Party were split on the issue, with 46 per cent in favour of supervised injection sites and 54 per cent against.

But Liberal Party and NDPsupporters were "overwhelmingly" in favourof the sites, Kurlsaid, with 79 and 80 per cent support, respectively.

That's likely related to the fact that safe injection sites were a topic of debate that "raged" for a long time while the Conservative government was in power, Kurlsaid. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Conservatives passed the Respect for Communities Act in 2015, which required strict criteria to be met before new safe injection sites could be considered.The Liberal government eased those requirements,with support from the NDP.

The Angus Reid Institute conducted its online survey from Nov. 14-20, 2017 among a "representative, randomized sample of 1,510 Canadian adults who are members of the Angus Reid Forum." A probability sample of this size, it says, would carry a margin or error of plus or minus 2.5 percentage points, 19 times out of 20.