The Windsor-Essex County Health Unit is looking for Windsor city council's support.
Officials with the health unit will go before council on Monday, seeking approval for the location of a Consumption and Treatment Service (CTS) facility.
Last October, the health unit selected a vacant storefront site at 628 Goyeau Street as the preferred site.
Manager of Epidemiology and Evaluation Ramsey D'Souza provided an update Thursday morning on recent overdose statistics in the region.
He says there were 13 overdose alerts issued in 2021, compared to only three in 2020, the highest figure ever issued in the area.
D'Souza says there were 416 drug-related overdoses in the region last year compared to 358 in 2020, with 64 deaths in 2020 and 33 deaths during the first seven months of 2021. Statistics were only available up until the end of July for overdose deaths in 2021.
He says the health unit has worked with its EMS partners on drug-related calls.
"Between February 1, 2019 and October 14, 2021, there were almost 900 suspected opioid and drug related EMS calls in Windsor-Essex," says D'Souza. "When we were mapping this out for suspected opioid and drug related EMS calls by municipality, it revealed that the vast majority of calls did come from the city of Windsor, almost 91 per cent."
He says prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the region saw a large number of fentanyl related deaths.
"However since the introduction of COVID and the pandemic on set the majority of accidental overdose deaths have been due to fentanyl," says D'Souza.
The other site the health unit considered was at 101 Wyandotte Street East.
The Windsor-Essex Community Opioid & Substance Strategy (WECOSS) hosted public consultation meetings in early August for the site.
Community input gathered in 2018 showed 61 per cent of residents are in favour of a safe consumption site.
If the site is approved by council, the health unit will send its application to Health Canada and the provincial government for approval.
The health unit hopes to have the site running by the end of the year.