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Core Topics => Harm Reduction => Topic started by: Chip on September 08, 2023, 12:52:59 AM
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source: https://theferret.scot/safe-supply-is-helping-drug-users-canada/
note: see the source address for links and pictures
How prescribing safe supply is helping drug users in Canada turn their lives around
September 3, 2023
Introduction and some excerpts:
The morning sun begins to sweep slowly across the city of Vancouver as the traffic noise starts to build. In her midtown flat, with its views over the downtown skyline to the soft blue of the Canadian mountain ranges beyond, BeeLee takes a tiny vial of liquid hydromorphone – a synthetic opioid sold under the brand name dilaudid – and draws its contents into a syringe.
She injects it into her muscle, then it’s time to get on with the rest of her morning routine. She walks her dog, Sadie, and drives to work in the city’s downtown eastside, where she works for a harm reduction service.
BeeLee, now 48, was prescribed hydromorphone at the beginning of 2019 after many years of addiction to first prescription, and then illicit drugs. Three times a week she visits a nurse for her morning injection. For other days, and afternoon top-ups, she is given “carries” – supplies she is allowed to use at home without supervision. This is what is helping her find stability again and rebuild the life she wants to live, she says.
Since 2016, when BeeLee’s home province of British Columbia announced a public health emergency, 36,000 Canadians have died from toxic drug poisoning. Safer supply – which includes the prescription of medical grade heroin, diamorphine, and liquid or tablet form hydromorphone – is a response that aims to save lives.
“This drug situation is already at a crisis point,” says Niamh Eastwood, of drug campaigning organisation Release. She warns that with the recent rise in synthetic opioids in the UK things could get worse. “This is why the UK and devolved governments must take action and ensure that treatment services are encouraged and supported to respond to the crisis through the supply of substitution medications.”
In Canada, safer supply programmes were born in the midst of the drugs crisis. Like many places across the world, the country experienced a sharp increase in deaths from heroin in about 2010. But a few years later it was deaths from fentanyl – a man-made opioid that can be 50 times more potent than heroin – that started to increase with dizzying pace. Now the deaths include those fuelled by fentanyl, cut with everything from benzodiazepines to veterinary sedative xylazine, known as Tranq Dope.
During 2022, 7,328 people died from opioid overdose across Canada – 2,342 in British Columbia alone. The deaths have not slowed – in the first seven months of this year 1,455 British Columbians died as a result of the toxic drug supply. That’s almost seven a day in a province not much bigger than Scotland.
It’s led to calls for a radical change of tack from conservative politicians and their advocates, who claim harm reduction measures are the cause, not the cure for the escalating deaths.
Campaigns run by right wing lobbying organisations like the Pacific Prosperity Network – which also owns social media pages like BC Proud – have demanded Vancouver “say no more free drugs” and lambasted “so-called leaders who continue to promote the myth of ’safe supply’”.
They claim the programmes are being “abused” with prescription drugs resold on the street. But health authorities insist that this isn’t evidenced, and participants and doctors involved in safer supply programmes say this just isn’t the reality. In May, Conservative Party of Canada leader Pierre Poilievre failed to gain backing for a motion to defund the programmes and invest dollars saved into treatment centres.
For the rest of the article and perspectives on some individual, take the source link as mentioned on line 1 of this post
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Safe supply has to be better than the status quo. I have to believe we will eventually have that universally for those who need it.
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Absolutely ! Rep given.