"Alcohol Still Leading Cause of Substance-related Hospitalizations in Canada, With Cannabis now a ‘Concerning’ Second" - Brishti Basu | Press Progress

“Alcohol has been the main driver of these stays, it’s been a problem in Canada for a long time,” Derek Lefebvre, a project lead at CIHI, told PressProgress.

Lefebvre is in charge of the team that analyzes diagnosis data for substance use-related hospitalizations directly from hospitals across Canada.

Overall, the CIHI found that in the past year, 540 people visited a hospital every day for an alcohol or drug-related illness across Canada.

Visualized below, this data shows how alcohol has accounted for more than 50% of all substance-related hospital visits for years. But now cannabis-related hospitalizations are in second place, on the rise in some parts of the country.

“Cannabis has fully moved up from the [third] most common to the second most common,” said Lefebvre. “It’s kind of concerning, especially given the opioid epidemic and stimulants, we expected those to always be the second and third highest. But cannabis has moved up and up in the range.”

Weed is nowhere near as deadly as the overdose crisis driven by synthetic opioids and the toxic drug crisis, which has killed 53,821 people across Canada between 2016 and 2025, according to federal data.

Toxic opioids caused 1,377 deaths in the first three months of 2025 alone — mostly in BC, Alberta and Ontario — and 62% of these deaths also involved a stimulant. In contrast, research thus far shows weed has been a contributor in significantly fewer deaths in Canada to date.

CIHI’s new data shows hospitalizations in BC and Alberta do mirror this trend, with opioids and stimulants consistently causing more hospitalizations than weed. But in Quebec and overall across Canada, cannabis places second.