Research has shown that there is a widespread trend across Canada and the United States, with an increasing use of fentanyl.

A few days ago, Dr. Marco Irac treated a patient in the emergency room at Humber River Hospital in Toronto, who had overdosed on carfentanil, a highly toxic opioid.

Stronger drugs are a common topic of concern for doctors like Irac, who told CBC News outside the emergency room earlier this week that the amount of resources needed for resuscitation is definitely higher.

Irac added that although the COVID-19 pandemic has receded for now, it has left behind a deterioration of mental health and financial difficulties. It is believed that this feeds a tsunami of overdoses.

A new report published on Thursday revealed that this is the case across Ontario, where people are increasingly dying from multiple toxic substances since the beginning of the pandemic.

This is also a clear trend across Canada and the United States, where recent research has shown that the number of deaths from overdoses involving fentanyl and stimulants (cocaine or methamphetamine) has increased more than 50-fold from 2010 to 2021.

The new report also found that following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, deaths from multiple substance overdoses in Ontario surpassed those from single substances.

The report, issued by the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network (ODPRN) and Public Health Ontario, provided further details on the victims and the drugs that killed them. This indicates an increasing supply of toxic and unregulated drugs, leading to more complex addictions that require precise treatments.

For her part, Tara Gomez, the lead author of the report, a research scientist at Unity Health Toronto, and the principal investigator at ODPRN, noted that what surprised her most was the complexity of the issue, adding that understanding the full range of all these different substances that contribute to harm and their frequency of use together in various ways highlights how difficult it is to address this problem.

Between 2018 and 2021, there were 8,767 accidental deaths due to toxic drug and alcohol use across Ontario.

Data from 2021 showed that 2,886 Ontario residents died from consuming a toxic substance—equivalent to the death of eight people every day. This number is also five times higher than the number of people who died in traffic incidents in the province in the same year, according to the report.

Meanwhile, the number of deaths in 2021 was also nearly double that of 2018.

The study also focused on the following four substances that proved to be responsible for the majority of deaths: opioids, alcohol, benzodiazepines, and stimulants.

Benzodiazepines are a class of sedative medications commonly prescribed for anxiety or sleep disorders, while stimulants are used to increase alertness, which in this study includes cocaine, methamphetamine, and amphetamines.

Before the pandemic, the number of people dying from one or two substances was relatively similar. However, after the emergency declaration due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) in March 2020, more deaths occurred as a result of the consumption of at least two substances.

The report also noted that most of these individuals had a combination of opioids and stimulants in their systems.

Gomez also stated in an interview with CBC News: "Often, we think that people are likely using drugs together intentionally."

Sometimes, people may use stimulants like cocaine or methamphetamine to try to counteract the sedative effects of opioid supplies, for example.

But she said it is also possible that there is mutual contamination of drugs, where substances unintentionally mix together.