Grant: Planning and Dissemination Grants - Institute/Initiative Community Support

Canada's toxic drug crisis remains one of the country's most pressing public health challenges, contributing to more than 55,000 opioid toxicity deaths between January 2016 and September 2025. Despite substantial investments in prevention, treatment, harm reduction, recovery, and enforcement initiatives, Canada lacks reliable and regularly updated estimates of how many people use illicit drugs. This critical information gap makes it difficult to evaluate the effectiveness of drug policies and programs. Without accurate estimates of the number of people who use illicit drugs, it is challenging to determine whether changes in overdose deaths, treatment uptake, health service use, and other outcomes reflect changes in drug use patterns, changes in risk among people who use drugs, or broader social and policy factors. This project will bring together researchers, policy-makers, health professionals, service providers, community organizations, and people with lived and living experience from across Canada to identify the data, methods, and partnerships needed to estimate the number of people who use illicit drugs. The project will: (1) establish a national network of experts and stakeholders to guide this work; (2) conduct a review of international methods used to estimate illicit drug use; (3) identify and assess Canadian data sources that could support estimation at national, provincial, territorial, and community levels; (4) engage stakeholders to identify policy-relevant indicators, data priorities, and knowledge gaps; and (5) produce reports, scientific publications, and a future grant proposal to support development of a national monitoring system. The findings will help lay the foundation for a national program to estimate and monitor illicit drug use and related harms in Canada. Ultimately, this work will provide evidence to understand substance use patterns, evaluate policies and programs, and improve responses to the ongoing toxic drug crisis.