Canada - Jane Philpott says pharmaceutical heroin a potential lifesaver in opioid...

[S.J.B.]

Jane Philpott says pharmaceutical heroin a potential lifesaver in opioid epidemic
Catharine Tunney
CBC
May 20th, 2017

Giving people with severe addictions prescription heroin could save lives as Canada continues to struggle with an opioid overdose epidemic, says Health Minister Jane Philpott.

"I know this is a challenging concept for some people to think about, but the reality is that when people go out on the streets they often commit crimes to be able to get the drugs they need. They're buying dirty drugs and they're dying," the physician-turned-politician said in an interview with Chris Hall, host of CBC Radio's The House.

"With people who don't respond to the traditional treatments like the Suboxone or methadone, the people with the most severe addiction, there's actually great evidence that if you give them clean heroin in a medically supervised setting under the direction of a doctor that you can not only help these people deal with their addiction and save their lives, it can lead to a tremendous amount of stability in their lives," said Philpott.

As health minister, Philpott speaks from a bully pulpit, but she's far from the first person to suggest prescription heroin as a potential fix for the fentanyl overdose crisis that killed close to 1,000 people in British Columbia in 2016, and is on track to kill a larger number of people this year.

So far, Providence Health Care's Crosstown Clinic on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a neighbourhood particularly ravaged by the opioid crisis, is the only clinic in North America that offers addicts actual heroin.

Read the full story here.

 

[cj]

It would save many lives in the US as well. I'm in the process of getting off methadone as its no longer controlling my cravings. I have made the decision to taper down to 80mg then get back on heroin/fentanyl. I'm just dust sick of jumping through hoops got a drug I don't even enjoy.

 

[Jabberwocky]

No to derail the thread, but wouldn't there be other hoops (and more associated risk) with getting back on heroin/fent? You know the risks better than anyone of course, I was just thinking that as much as I hated dealing with the clinic, it was still preferable to the shit I'd been dealing with prior to starting ORT.

Of course if I were to start using again today it is highly likely my use wouldn't get out of control right away, but sooner or later there is an extremely high likelihood that it would. And that isn't even taking into consideration the social, legal and health risks associated with something like heroin. I can certainly understand the urge of wanting to get off methadone though.

Do you think it is more than you want off the methadone OR more that you want to get high from opioids (neither answer makes you better or less than of a person)? If it's more of the former, I'd really look into trying iboga, DXM or some other dissociative for helping you deal with getting off methadone. But if it's more the latter, I'd just caution you to be very careful about what you're doing, and doing it as safely as possible.

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OT: I would also love to see these in the states. I have a feeling it is going to be a long fucking time before we do (assuming we ever do). I mean, look how we continue to treat the single most valuable tool we have access to in the treatment of severe opioid use disorder (that tool being, methadone).

Didn't Canada have some kind of Hydromorphone Replacement Therapy trials or something at one point? I wonder how that turned out, and what happened to it.

 

[S.J.B.]

Didn't Canada have some kind of Hydromorphone Replacement Therapy trials or something at one point? I wonder how that turned out, and what happened to it.

Here are the results. Hydromorphone ends up looking like the better option compared to diacetylmorphine, interestingly enough. The most surprising result to me is that, in a controlled trial, even people who have been using street heroin for decades can't tell the difference between pure heroin and hydromorphone.