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North Bay police chief concerned with amount of street drugs in the city

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Police have arrested eight people in the last week in relation to drug busts, and Chief Scott Tod told CTV News this is concerning.

“We do have a drug problem in North Bay,” Tod said.

“We do have a growing number of individuals in our community that use drugs. My biggest concern is what it’s doing to the people in our community -- it destroys families, it destroys relationships it destroys people from being employed.”

Of the eight people recently arrested, the majority are from North Bay, but Tod said that isn’t always the case.

“We’ve been very successful at targeting people coming into our community to sell drugs, people largely from the Greater Toronto area, and also from Ottawa and Montreal,” he said.

“We’ve also seen an increase in trafficking of a larger weight of drugs within our community by local people that are associated to North Bay in general.”

City Coun. George Maroosis has been on council for the majority of the last 40 years, and he said street drugs have been a problem in North Bay for a while now.

What concerns him is the number of overdoses the drugs lead to.

“Since we are the Gateway City and you can go in all directions, I’m sure we have a multitude of drugs that pass through here,” Maroosis said.

“I’m concerned about street drugs because that’s when we get into the overdoses. We’ve had an epidemic in the north -- not only in North Bay -- of drug overdoses.”

The most recent arrest police made saw them seize more than $100,000 in illegal drugs. Tod said recently, each drug call police have dealt with seems to be for a significant amount of drugs.

“The last three arrests that we have made of a combination of groups of people, we see a larger amount of drugs being seized and cash on those people also,” he said.

“Yes it is concerning, that we believe people profiting from trafficking drugs in our community and that’s very distressing as the chief of police to see that happening.”

Police said drugs they are most often seeing are cocaine, fentanyl and methamphetamine.

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