Naloxone will soon be on all Windsor Fire and Rescue trucks.
After a lengthy debate Monday, which included fire chief Steve Laforet endorsing the idea, council voted in favour of having the life saving drug on each fire truck.
Councillor Rino Bortolin has been fighting for years for all first responders to carry Naloxone and is calling the decision a step in the right direction.
He says this should have been done a long time ago.
"EMS already carries it. Police have started to deploy it. I expect by the end of this calendar year that all of Windsor police will be carrying it. I think it's a good step in the right direction because, to be quite frank, I'm sick of having this discussion. It's a no-brainer. It should just be out there and should be done."
Bortolin says this addresses a small part of a much bigger problem.
"Naloxone is a tool to deal with the overdoses. What we need to start talking about is how to address the actual issues. How do we actually get those numbers of overdoses down? How do we get people into treatment centres? How do we get people that are addicted the help that they need? That's where we actually need to start having this conversation."
He says he'd like to see the opioid crisis treated with the same urgency as the COVID-19 pandemic.
"The epidemic tied to the opioid and crystal meth situation in our community is a lot bigger than the COVID pandemic that we're dealing with. We need to start treating this as critically and as strongly as we did the COVID response. It's an epidemic and it's an epidemic everywhere."
The rollout is expected to take about eight weeks as firefighters will need additional training on how to administer the drug — the total cost is estimated at roughly $4,000.
When it comes to the Windsor police, the service is working to equip its City Centre Patrol and the Problem Oriented Policing units with Naloxone — the decision on whether or not every officer will carry the drug is ultimately left up to the Police Services Board.