Past the numbers: Overdose deaths down, overdoses up in parts of Sask.

After years of increases and calls about a crisis, Saskatchewan is expected to see overdose death numbers for 2025 lower than any year since at least 2020 – but digging deeper into what happened in the year paints a more complicated picture.

Between both the confirmed and suspected drug toxicity deaths, also called overdose deaths, counted by the Saskatchewan Coroner’s office, there were 331 total deaths in 2025. That number could go down if some of the suspected deaths are removed.

Read more:

• Sask. government doesn’t know how many people are waiting for addictions treatment
• Sask. govt introduces new act to respond to illicit drug trafficking
• Hidden Crisis: Families left behind

If the number stays the same as deaths are investigated, the province will have had the lowest number of such deaths in five years, when it hit 325 on the upswing in 2020.

The numbers saw a significant decrease from 2023 to 2024 – a 109 death difference, including suspected deaths – but the trend continued downward in 2025.

The coroner’s officer has attributed 201 of those deaths to areas of the province. Regina and Saskatoon are at the top of the list, as they have been every year.

Regina’s confirmed death numbers sat at 53 in the report as of January first, a significant decrease from the 129 in 2024 and nearly a third what the number was in 2020. The end-of-year statistics for the Regina Police Service list 84 apparent overdose deaths in 2025.

Saskatoon’s confirmed death numbers so far for 2025, show just a slight decrease from 2024 at 78 and is also the lowest number for Saskatoon since 2020. The 2025 numbers for both cities could still change as more deaths are confirmed.

Despite the lower deaths, overdoses as a whole appeared to skyrocket in Saskatoon in 2025.

Saskatoon Fire said it got double the number of calls in 2025 that it did in 2024 – from 1,281 to 2,512.

The overdoses Prairie Harm Reduction (PHR) saw were even higher, four to five time more than it saw in 2024, according to Executive Director Kayla DeMong. PHR provides harm reduction and recovery services, as well as running Saskatoon’s only safe consumption site.

DeMong believes the naloxone kits and training it provided made the difference. Naloxone can block the effects of a drug and reverse and overdose.

“The difference is, is that the amount of naloxone that is available in the community has mitigated those deaths,” she explained.

She said PHR gave out around 12,000 kits in 2025. In contrast, AIDS Program South Saskatchewan, in Regina, which hosts a needle exchange program and provides naloxone training, gave out around 2,000 kits in 2025.

“Most of (the people that access our services) … carry multiple naloxone kits on them at a time, and many have said that they’ve reversed multiple overdoses yesterday or overnight,”

PHR was the first community organization to distribute naloxone in Saskatchewan and is now the largest community distributor in the province.

DeMong said there was massive shift in 2025 from the community to have the kits on-hand. She explained PHR already went out and did training for restaurants and bars, but in 2025, she saw an increase in other kinds of businesses looking for the kits and training as well.

“A lot more trades companies, insurance companies, community associations, a lot of people in the general public asking to come and get trained,” she explained.

“We’ve had retailers who had seen an overdose in front of their store and asked for their staff to be trained so they knew what to do if it happened again.”

She said there’s been a lot of media coverage and public messaging about the drug crisis and people are seeing it all over the place and recognizing what’s happening.

Drug toxicity

A factor that was mentioned by those in the harm reduction industry, both when it comes to Saskatoon’s higher overdoses and the lower number of overdose deaths in the province, was drug toxicity.

Eighteen drug alerts were sent out in 2025 through the Ministry of Health’s alert system for Saskatoon about deaths, high numbers of overdoses and drugs having been found with contaminants. Regina was the next highest with seven, Swift Current had two, and Prince Albert, Kelvington, Kamsack, Meadow Lake, and North Battleford had one alert sent out each.

PHR does the drug testing in Saskatoon and DeMong said a lot of the substances they’re able to test are brought in by people accessing their services.

“We had a lot of people bring in stuff that they had seen somebody overdose on the day before or that night and brought it in to be tested so that we had the information,” she said.

The higher number of drug alerts is likely in part because of more toxic drugs, according to DeMong, but she also explained the organization was aggressive in testing.

“As we saw an increase in toxicity we did see a considerable push from our staff and the people who use our services to know what is happening,” she said.

Read more:

• Sask. joins recovery-oriented provincial addictions partnership
• Sask. introduces new act allowing involuntary addiction treatment
• Drug users ‘turning to needles’ after Saskatchewan cuts pipe program

She said PHR has multiple testing programs and, with the information it gets from other programs and national groups, it starts testing for substances that haven’t yet made it to Saskatchewan, so they know as soon as they arrive.

In Regina, emergency services didn’t see an increase in calls about overdoses, Regina Fire & Protective Services saw a more than 200 call decrease in 2025 and Regina police saw about 350 fewer calls from the year before.

Vidya Reddy, educational research specialist at AIDS Program South Saskatchewan in Regina, guessed one of the reasons overdoses and deaths were down was a less toxic supply in the area.

Emile Gariepy, harm reduction manager at Wâhkôhtowin Harm Reduction in Regina, agreed that the drug toxicity might not have been too bad, saying it was pretty quiet during most of 2025. But he did point out there was a serious alert in the Regina area at the end of the year.

“We have some pretty dangerous drugs coming along through Regina and our death rates and our overdose rates are going up a lot right now,” explained Gariepy.

Reddy said it’s difficult to pinpoint one thing that would have caused the decrease in overdose deaths, but he said harm reduction programs like Naloxone kits and training likely played a part, as well as the use of the drug alert system.

What Reddy believes didn’t play a part in the lower numbers was recovery programs – despite the provincial government’s push, he said he’s not aware of any information that access to recovery programs has gone up in a significant manner.

“Maybe going forward, that might play a role, but at this point we’ve not significantly increased our capacity to provide access to recovery programs in any significant manner,” said Reddy.

How to keep going

If the provincial government wants to continue the trend of lower overdose deaths, Reddy said it would be a good idea to reintroduce the supply of clean pipes. He said it would reduce people injecting their drugs.

Gariepy said he thought the province providing funding to Wâhkôhtowin’s safe consumption site would help, allowing them to stay open longer than 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The provincial government has said previously, while it does fund harm reduction like naloxone kits, it’s not interested in funding safe consumption sites.

DeMong said the government should be putting more money into the distribution of nasal naloxone – saying it’s easier to carry and is more appealing for people who don’t want to inject someone.

Last year, she said the province purchased about 5,000 nasal naloxone kits for distribution, but she said with the current need, that doesn’t go very far.

DeMong also echoed the others, saying the provincial government could reduce the numbers even more with more investment in community agencies and responses.

“There is a huge push from the people of Saskatchewan to support these initiatives … we survive based on donations and those donations come from the people of Saskatchewan and businesses who see the value in harm reduction and that intervention piece in keeping people alive,” said DeMong.

She said, even if people who use PHR’s services don’t want to stop using, the organization provides services that keep people alive.

“When people are alive they get to make choices and they don’t get to do that if they’re dead,” said DeMong.