Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is rejecting recommendations from British Columbia's top health officials to widen the scope of his government's decriminalization agenda beyond marijuana to help stem the country's growing opioid crisis. Mr. Trudeau will meet Friday with health experts in Vancouver to discuss Canada's response to the rising toll of overdose deaths, the latest in a series of meetings where he has engaged with British Columbians on the front lines of the deadly opioid battle. The Prime Minister quietly met with first responders in the Downtown Eastside last December. At that time, British Columbia was tallying its worst year for drug overdoses and in January, his government promised $10 million in additional health funding for B.C. to boost its response to a fentanyl-fuelled epidemic. [continues 605 words]
Worried about their teenage daughter's drug use and signs of depression, a Vancouver area couple began to secretly monitor her life on social media. What they found propelled them into a desperate quest to find medical treatment: Their daughter, unwilling to talk with them, was openly discussing suicide, self-harm and an escalating dependence on hard drugs with her friends. "I'm alive because I'm too scared to kill myself," she text messaged one day. Other texts revealed that she was stealing to pay back debts to dealers and her casual embrace of dangerous party drugs. She wrote that on one day, she did a "ton of e [ecstasy] and the next a bit of mdma." The drugs may have numbed her depression in the short term, but only made things worse. "Why is it so impossible to be happy?" she posted to her network of peers. [continues 910 words]
The manufacturing equipment required to produce fentanyl-laced drugs for the street isn't much to look at: A tabletop pill press and a kitchen blender are enough to process an online order of opioids. The set-up fits easily inside a small utility trailer and can churn out 18,000 counterfeit Oxycontin tablets in one hour. But the drugs produced in these tiny, mobile labs also pose a risk to police, firefighters, paramedics and other emergency crews. A couple of grains, which can be absorbed on skin contact, can be lethal. [continues 590 words]
Treatment Clinic, Part Of Salome Research, Will Examine Therapy For Addicts Who Have Not Responded To Methadone Just weeks before the spotlight hits Vancouver for the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, a landmark medical study is set to begin, drawing attention to the one class of Vancouverites that the city doesn't want to showcase: Heroin addicts. The four-year trial will provide 322 chronic addicts at a private Vancouver clinic with heroin or a legal substitute opiate, Hydromorphone. "This could revolutionize heroin treatment internationally," said Trish Walsh, executive director of the InnerChange Foundation. "It's exciting to start this before the Olympics, we think it's a great opportunity treat the root cause of homelessness in the Downtown Eastside." [continues 520 words]
VICTORIA - Canada should be willing to offer prescription heroin for intractable addicts - the same as for any other treatment for a medical condition, a high-profile federal Conservative says. Former MP John Reynolds, who co-chaired Prime Minster Stephen Harper's 2006 election campaign, is a director of the charity that is fundraising for a new medical trial that will provide heroin and a substitute narcotic in Vancouver and Montreal. "If we can show this works, why wouldn't we move towards that kind of help for people who are addicts," Mr. Reynolds said in an interview yesterday. "Is there really any difference from one disease to another? From one addiction to another?" [continues 564 words]
VICTORIA - Even if groundbreaking research into a substitute treatment for heroin is successful, heroin itself should be available as a medical option for addicts, a top addictions researcher told The Globe and Mail Tuesday. "Like in any other medical condition, patients respond well to a given treatment, but not all of them," Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes said in a forum on The Globe's website. Dr. Oviedo-Joekes is a principal investigator of the SALOME project, which is recruiting heroin addicts for a medical trial that will offer both heroin and a legal narcotic substitute to determine their effectiveness as a harm-reduction treatment. While the long-term goal is to help the addicts get off hard drugs, in the short term, the plan is to get them away from the more dangerous aspects of heroin addiction, such as committing crimes, sharing needles, and shooting up in back alleys. [continues 508 words]
Two hundred drug addicts in Montreal and Vancouver will be lining up for free heroin later this year at publicly funded clinics. And they can thank the federal Conservative government, despite its hard line against hard drugs. The trial - which will offer the drug in pill and injectable forms as well - builds on a similar heroin experiment last year that found most participants committed far fewer crimes and their physical and mental health improved. The three-year medical trial will put Canada on the leading edge of international addictions research "for a population that is in desperate need for alternate health options," said Michael Krausz, the lead investigator. [continues 490 words]
In the Past Six Months, Addicts on Victoria Streets Have Found Access to Clean Needles Increasingly Difficult, Leaving Outreach Workers to Desperately Search for Ways to Prevent the Spread of Disease and Death. The Fifth in a Series of 10 Remarkable People, Places or Things VICTORIA -- In the past six months, drug addicts in Victoria have misplaced more than 60,000 needles, proving the city's needle exchange program is, increasingly, a misnomer. Since public pressure led to the closing of a long-time storefront exchange site in May, AIDS Vancouver Island has tried to fill the gap with a mobile service, where outreach workers on foot and on bicycles roam the streets trying to find addicts in need of clean gear. [continues 1195 words]
VICTORIA -- The opiates flowed from Europe, under heavy guard. Shipped in powder form, they came in tidily packaged vials, 24 to a box. In each vial were 10 grams of pure heroin - just add water. Most of the shipments ended up in a nondescript building in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, stored in a vault behind bulletproof glass. Throughout the day, a stream of hardcore heroin addicts would arrive for their fixes. Each was allowed three visits a day. Now the flow of clients has almost stopped. Only a handful remain in the final weeks of North America's first medically prescribed heroin trial. [continues 997 words]
No Laws Needed To Protect B.C. Children Found In Grow-Ops, Minister Says Three Children Were Found Last Week In An Abbotsford Home Filled With Enough Carbon Monoxide To Kill A Person In A Matter Of Hours VICTORIA -- Social workers in the Fraser Valley were called in last week to deal with three young children found in a grow-op. Despite the wearying familiarity of the scene, they had to make a child-protection decision in the absence of any specific policy. [continues 438 words]
VICTORIA -- Transportation Minister Kevin Falcon is trying to broker a deal this week between B.C. Ferries and its work force that could pave the way for drug and alcohol testing for ferry crew. Mr. Falcon met yesterday with Jackie Miller, president of the B.C. Ferry and Marine Workers' Union, to address concerns raised last week by the Transportation Safety Board about drug use by ferry crew. He is expected to meet today with the company president, David Hahn. "My sense is the union very much wants to drive to a solution on this problem," Mr. Falcon told reporters. "The hope for me is that I can find common ground between management and the union's position, and try to forge consensus." [continues 515 words]
RCMP Refused To Test Crew For Drugs: Ferry Chief BC Ferries Chief Describes How His Repeated Requests Were Rebuffed VICTORIA -- David Hahn, president of BC Ferries, repeatedly asked to have the bridge crew of the Queen of the North tested for drugs and alcohol in the hours after the ship crashed and sank, but RCMP investigators refused. That revelation follows last week's findings that some members of the crew regularly consumed marijuana both on and off the ship, and the assertion that there was no evidence to show that any crew members on the doomed ship were impaired. [continues 634 words]
VICTORIA -- The Canadian navy is reviewing its drug-testing program after evidence of widespread cocaine use and trafficking aboard armed military patrol ship HMCS Saskatoon - allegedly involving as many as a third of the crew - has come to light in a series of military trials. Four sailors have been dismissed from the Canadian Forces and three so far have been convicted of cocaine trafficking, following an undercover investigation by the Forces. "There's a goodly level of concern with regard to the circumstances and a lot of smart people are putting their heads toward whether there needs to be changes to the random drug-testing program," Lieutenant-Commander Gerry Pash, a spokesman for Maritime Forces Pacific, said yesterday. [continues 401 words]
