More than 2,200 died of opioids in Ontario last year as numbers trend downward: data [Video]

TORONTO — More than 2,200 Ontarians died from opioids last year, a 15 per cent decrease from 2023, newly released data from the Office of the Chief Coroner shows.

“What goes through my head is a small degree of optimism in the fact that we have seen less people die last year, which is very good, but that’s within a context of 2,231 people dying last year,” Dr. Dirk Huyer, the chief coroner, told The Canadian Press in an interview.

His office had recorded 2,639 opioid deaths in 2023.

“I also have a degree of worry that this is a short interval, for whatever reason that we haven’t identified, and that the numbers could potentially get worse again,” Huyer said.

The mortality rate from opioid overdoses was 14.3 deaths per 100,000 people in 2024. That is down from the peak of 19.4 deaths per 100,000 people at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2021, when opioids took the …