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Photo by DARRYL DYCK / THE CANADIAN PRESS

The results come a week after the B.C. Coroners Service reported that 161 people died of a suspected illicit-drug overdose in March, the second deadliest month since record keeping began. Fentanyl has been detected in about 83 per cent of 391 drug deaths in the first quarter of 2018, the coroners said. It has been two years since B.C. declared a public-health emergency due to increased overdoses, which last year took 1,448 lives.

Jordan Westfall, president of the Canadian Association of People Who Use Drugs, said the pilot study shows the pressing need for safer drugs.

“It’s very clear right now that people are dying because of a contaminated drug supply — ‘fent-in-all’, so to speak,” he said. “It just reaffirms again and again that we need to do something completely different. Otherwise, thousands more people are going to die.”

Westfall said it’s unclear whether the information presented in the study will have an effect on where people buy drugs. Because the supply chain is illicit and unregulated, the street-level dealer may not have been the person who cut the drug with another substance, he said.

He said there is hope for change with evidence-based treatments such as the B.C. Centre for Disease Control’s hydromorphone-pill pilot project. But he said key to stymying the overdose crisis is ensuring people have access to safer substances, which includes expanding opioid-dependency treatment beyond methadone and Suboxone.