News Despite soaring death rate from opioids, Alberta steers away from harm-reduction approach

[thegreenhand]

Despite soaring death rate from opioids, Alberta steers away from harm-reduction approach​

Taylor Lambert
CBC
18 Feb 2023

Excerpt:

Vee Duncan relapsed a few weeks ago.

They had managed to stay away from opioids for a year and a half, but the disease of addiction reset that calendar. They know it's not a moral lapse or failure on their part — addiction is complex, and most people's journeys don't follow a straight line.

Alberta and British Columbia are the hardest-hit provinces in terms of accidental opioid deaths per capita. B.C.'s approach to the crisis includes some harm reduction and a decriminalization pilot, though many observers say neither goes far enough to have real impact.

Alberta, meanwhile, has taken one of the hardest tacks against what experts, frontline workers and drug users agree is the one strategy that is most likely to save the most lives: providing pharmaceutical-grade drugs to drug users, commonly known as safe supply.

"I really believe if we had access to safe supply and supervised consumption sites and drug-checking services on a broader, population-level scale, we could reduce deaths immediately in the short term," says Rebecca Haines-Saah, an associate professor at the University of Calgary's Cumming School of Medicine.

 

[Landrew]

different year same shit, Danielle Smith brings big lies and bad math.

How much have drug-poisoning deaths in Alberta really gone down?

The Alberta government encouraged optimism surrounding the current state of addiction in the province ahead of making changes to the way mental health and addiction services will be offered earlier this week. CTV News Edmonton has done an analysis of the publicly available drug-poisoning death...

edmonton.ctvnews.ca