Alberta cancelling iOAT (safe supply) program in March 2021

[Joey]

With a record number of overdose deaths, Alberta moves to end access to legal injectable opioids

Patients who use the therapy are suing the Alberta government for ending a program that serves injectable synthetic opioids to people who are severely...

www.google.ca

When Susan Tierney’s son Keigan was living on the streets and in the grips of a severe opioid addiction, she would spend her nights waiting for her phone to ring, hoping to hear his voice.

“We asked him to call us once a week just so we would know he was alive, and we wouldn’t hear from him for weeks at a time,” the mother of two said from her home in Calgary.

“I can’t even explain what that feeling is like. And I would not have been a fan of or a supporter of a harm reduction program until we saw what it did for our son.”

The program that helped Keigan, 27, turn his life around was Alberta’s Injectable Opioid Agonist Therapy program, known as iOAT. It provides injectable synthetic opioids three times a day to patients in a clinical supervised setting.

The program was established by Alberta’s previous government in 2019 and includes one clinic in Edmonton and one in Calgary. It targets individuals who have been using opioids intravenously for years, sometimes decades, and requires them to have failed at least two other previous treatments or to prove that they’ve been unable to access effective treatment at all.

The provincial government has decided it won’t continue to fund the program after March 2021.

 

[S.J.B.]

Well I hope they find them physicians who will continue their treatment regimes, at least.

 

[Joey]

Well I hope they find them physicians who will continue their treatment regimes, at least.

Hopefully. Heroin has been legal to prescribe for an addiction since 2016 in Canada but the problem with it very few doctors are with the times on the issue. I’m BC they have expanded safe supply so that everyone right down to a basic nurse can prescribe it because doctors have largely been unwilling when legally and publically they are both able and wanted to do that.

 

[S.J.B.]

Hopefully. Heroin has been legal to prescribe for an addiction since 2016 in Canada but the problem with it very few doctors are with the times on the issue. I’m BC they have expanded safe supply so that everyone right down to a basic nurse can prescribe it because doctors have largely been unwilling when legally and publically they are both able and wanted to do that.

I'm pretty sure all these folks in Alberta are on hydromorphone in any case, which is easier to procure and a little less stigmatized among physicians.

 

[Joey]

I'm pretty sure all these folks in Alberta are on hydromorphone in any case, which is easier to procure and a little less stigmatized among physicians.

Just a little though. The idea of treating addicts by giving them their drugsof the good variety hasn’t completely caught on yet. Even if it’s safer, I think that part is being ignored or disparaged due to the old school of thought.

Harm reduction and safe supply programs are coming along across the board overall, but it’s unfortunate that iOAT is being defunded. It only supplies 100 people but thats 100 people much safer and healthier, It could’ve been a start to a much bigger set of programs in Alberta. It’s a delay in the process now shutting it down.

Canada is moving this direction so it’s too bad Alberta wants to be ass backward right now.

 

[Anissa1355]

This is such BS. BCs programs are doing well and saving lives. It was actually supposed to close doors in 2020.
You can refer people to the Boyle Mucully Health Centre. The Drs will do the OAT but not the iOAT.