The federal health minister has breached international medical ethical standards by stopping participants in a Downtown Eastside clinical study from getting post-trial access to heroin, according to a scathing editorial in Canada’s leading medical journal.
On Oct. 3, Health Minister Rona Ambrose announced that participants finishing Providence Health Care’s radical trial had three months to find alternative treatments to injectable heroin, despite already having approval for special post-trial access to injectable heroin. The minister’s announcement goes against a section of the World Medical Association’s Helsinki Declaration on human research ethics, according to Dr. John Fletcher, the Canadian Medical Association Journal’s editor-in-chief.
“Whatever we may think of people with chronic addiction to heroin, they are marginalized, vulnerable, have poor health and are often socio-economically disadvantaged ...” Fletcher wrote. “As research participants, they should be protected, not exploited.
“Whatever we may think of our government’s prerogative to set policy and take a lead, its action broke an ethical obligation of two of its own federal bodies, CIHR (Canadian Institutes of Health Research) and Health Canada.”
Fletcher added that Ambrose’s announcement “swept aside the careful planning” of researchers with those two bodies and the University of British Columbia who are comparing the effectiveness of diacetylmorphine — prescription heroin — and an oral painkiller known as hydromorphone for treating severe heroin addiction.
