A startling string of drug overdoses in Surrey over the weekend has public health officials calling for long-overdue supervised consumption sites in the city.

There have been 43 overdoses reported since Friday, an unprecedented surge in cases that the Fraser Health Authority largely blames on crack cocaine laced with deadly fentanyl.

Dr. Perry Kendall, B.C.’s Chief Medical Officer, said the drug crisis in Surrey now rivals that of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“They have fewer services than the Downtown Eastside has, so this means their problems in some respects are a lot worse,” Kendall said. “They have more people who are less connected to health services and they have nothing like a supervised consumption site.”

Such sites can accommodate a variety of users, whether they’re injecting, smoking or snorting drugs, Kendall said.

And the Insite supervised injection site, which opened in the Downtown Eastside 13 years ago, has proven they can both save lives and help introduce people to addiction services.

“Insite in Vancouver clearly shows that people who go there are more likely to get into addictions care than people who don’t have that opportunity,” he said.

The Fraser Health Authority confirmed it’s already trying to identify priority sites for safe consumption services in the region. But for now, at least, the idea is missing the support of Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner.

“I don’t support stand-alone sites,” Hepner said Monday. “What I’m hearing is there may be other options than a safe injection site.”

Because of Bill C-2, the previous Conservative government’s Respect for Communities Act, any proposed safe consumption site requires consent from city council, local police forces, the provincial health minister and Health Canada.

Applicants are also required to submit information on crime rates and public nuisances in the area surrounding proposed sites.

Kendall said Bill C-2 has made it nearly impossible to introduce much-needed safe consumption sites in the country, and called on the federal government to do away with it.

“I believe the easiest thing to do would be to repeal it and put in place something that’s much more reasonable,” he told CTV News.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has already said his government intends to stick with the legislation, at least for now.

Fraser Health also said it’s working to increase access to naloxone, a medication that can reverse the effects of opioid overdoses. Take-home naloxone kits have been available here since 2012, and have already stopped hundreds of overdoses in B.C. from becoming fatal, according to the Ministry of Health.

But they haven’t stopped 2016 from becoming an eye-opening year for drug fatalities. There were 371 overdose deaths from Jan. 1 to June 30, a 75 per cent increase over the same period in 2015.

According to the B.C. Coroners Service, 127 of those deaths were in the Fraser Valley – more than any other region in the province.

With a report from CTV Vancouver’s Tom Popyk