---
title: "Flushed with data: what the sewers reveal about drug use in eight Canadian cities"
description: "Meth rules the Prairies, cocaine Halifax and fentanyl Vancouver, Statistics Canada’s wastewater finds"
author: "Albion Grey"
published: 2026-09-26T08:00:00Z
modified: 2026-09-27T03:04:49Z
url: https://rews.cc/a/flushed-with-data-what-the-sewers-reveal-about-drug-use-in-e-2b8919
language: en
tags: ["health", "drugs", "wastewater", "methamphetamine", "fentanyl", "us"]
publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)"
---

# Flushed with data: what the sewers reveal about drug use in eight Canadian cities

*Meth rules the Prairies, cocaine Halifax and fentanyl Vancouver, Statistics Canada’s wastewater finds*

By Albion Grey · September 26, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/flushed-with-data-what-the-sewers-reveal-about-drug-use-in-e-2b8919

## In brief

- Statistics Canada measured drug metabolites in wastewater from eight cities between January 2024 and March 2026, covering 9.2m people
- Prince Albert’s methamphetamine load hit 2,003 milligrams per 1,000 people per day in March 2026, over nine times Toronto’s
- Halifax had the lowest methamphetamine but high cocaine; cocaine figured in 86% of Nova Scotia’s 2024 stimulant deaths
- Metro Vancouver had the highest fentanyl levels of the eight cities, though they declined alongside the local drug death rate
- Toronto led on MDMA; Montreal recorded the lowest codeine and methadone levels of the cities surveyed

Flush a toilet in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and the wastewater tells a different story from Halifax or Vancouver. That, in essence, is the finding of a Statistics Canada survey of drug metabolites — the chemical traces excreted after the body breaks drugs down — in samples from eight cities, taken in one-week windows every two months between January 2024 and March 2026. The catchments serve about 9.2m people. The data cannot say how many people use a drug, or how much, but they are “a pretty good proxy of drug consumption” in the area a treatment plant serves, Sianne Kuang, a StatCan analyst, told CBC News.

The sharpest divide concerns methamphetamine. Prince Albert recorded the highest levels of any city monitored, and the wildest swings: in March 2026 its estimated load was 2,003 milligrams per 1,000 people per day — more than nine times Toronto’s roughly 214 milligrams. Saskatoon followed, at about 958 milligrams that month, with Moncton, New Brunswick, close behind. Edmonton peaked at about 1,071 milligrams in January 2025 and stood at 624 in March 2026, nearly three times Toronto’s level.

Moncton joined the survey only in March 2025, so trends there are harder to read, but the stakes are plain: methamphetamine was involved in 63% of stimulant toxicity deaths in New Brunswick in 2024, the highest such share in Atlantic Canada. Halifax, by contrast, had the lowest methamphetamine reading of the eight cities — just 56 milligrams per 1,000 people per day in March 2026 — while its cocaine load, about 1,734 milligrams, was comparatively high. Cocaine was involved in 86% of Nova Scotia’s stimulant-related deaths in 2024, against 14% for methamphetamine; earlier CBC reporting has traced the drug’s growing role in the province’s drug deaths. Prince Albert’s cocaine reading, around 5,296 milligrams, was roughly three times Halifax’s.

Why should habits differ so sharply between cities a few provinces apart? Supply, mostly, the experts say. “There’s many different drivers of different substance use, and one of them is just what is available in the market,” said Kora DeBeck, a professor at Simon Fraser University’s School of Public Policy. “It seems much more connected to drug trafficking and how the networks of drug production and trafficking work, and we really don’t have good insight into that.” Monty Ghosh, an addiction physician and researcher at the University of Alberta, notes that local cooks use different precursors, formulas and mixtures: “They don’t have the same formula they’re using. They don’t use necessarily the same compounds or drugs.”

Metro Vancouver remains the outlier on opioids, recording the highest fentanyl levels of all eight cities throughout. Average levels declined in 2025 and early 2026 compared with 2024 — a change StatCan says coincided with a drop in Vancouver’s unregulated drug death rate. Ms DeBeck cautions against crediting consumer preference either way. “People didn’t demand or want fentanyl in the beginning. It just arrived and was there, and then people became dependent on it,” she said. Mr Ghosh adds a caveat of method: “there’s different forms of fentanyl out there, which may not be measured here.”

Toronto’s distinction is chemical rather than fatal: across the reporting months from July 2024 to March 2026 it posted the highest average MDMA levels of the eight, at about 40 milligrams per 1,000 people per day. Montreal, meanwhile, was strikingly abstemious on opioids — the lowest codeine levels of any city, never exceeding about 44 milligrams per 1,000 people per day against a combined-city average ranging from roughly 97 to 219, plus the lowest methadone readings and some of the lowest for oxycodone and morphine. Its stimulant profile looked more like Toronto’s: little methamphetamine, relatively generous MDMA.

Sewage, of course, has its limits as a witness. StatCan warns that commuting, tourism and the temporary crowds drawn by special events can all muddy the estimates. “It’s only one part of the picture,” Mr Ghosh said. Still, as pictures go it is a cheap and honest one — treatment plants neither exaggerate nor blush. For policymakers groping for a response to an overdose crisis that varies block by block, let alone province by province, the sewers offer what the street often will not: numbers.