In small town Ontario, fighting opioid crisis requires personal touch

When you are a town of just 14,000 people, every opioid overdose is personal.

Pembroke, Ont., about 120 kilometres northwest of Ottawa, has more than double the number of fatal overdoses per capita than the rest of the province, according to Public Health Ontario. And the mortality rate is more than four times higher in Pembroke than in the surrounding county, according to Renfrew County and District Health Unit.

So in response, Renfrew county has been trying a different approach, dubbed the mesa project. Its goal is to build personal relationships between the experts and the vulnerable population by sending teams out to the community on a regular basis. 

The team is made up of a paramedic, an addictions councillor and a crisis worker who return to the same places week after week.

To understand the situation, CBC Ottawa's Omar Dabaghi-Pacheco and Ryan Garland visited Pembroke to follow paramedic Lori Shannon on the job and see the work through her eyes.

Like Shannon, they bumped into the same people on the streets every day and followed her on emergency calls to help the people they had seen just that day.

This is the third in a CBC Ottawa docuseries exploring the human side of the opioid crisis in eastern Ontario. 

On the streets of Ottawa, Garland and Dabaghi-Pacheco met people like Jessica Currie, who has been using fentanyl for years. Currie said it's too dangerous to deal with withdrawal on the streets. 

They visited Belleville in March when a state of emergency was declared due to toxic opioids. Local resident Melissa Lynch said it's still hard to handle addiction once drug-users are housed. She compared it to leaving them there to die.