Canada - New Ottawa initiative will allow homeless drug users to inject...

[S.J.B.]

New Ottawa initiative will allow homeless drug users to inject prescription opioids
CBC
August 4th, 2017

Ottawa will soon become the second Canadian city to have a managed opioid program in place for homeless people trying to kick their drug addictions.

Ottawa Inner City Health (OICH) is in the midst of setting up the program, which will initially allow people with addictions to take prescribed opioids under a doctor's supervision at local shelters — rather than risking their lives with street drugs.

"When people buy [drugs] off the street, first of all, they don't really know the dose," said Wendy Muckle, the agency's executive director.

"And secondly, we have a huge problem with fentanyl being laced in everything … People don't know when they get it and how much they are getting."

Read the full story here.

 

[S.J.B.]

I think this model is going to become the standard in large cities in Canada very soon. The original clinic in Vancouver published research comparing hydromorphone to heroin for maintenance and found the two drugs to be comparably effective. This has really opened up the door to providing low-barrier maintenance prescriptions. Heroin itself carries a huge amount of stigma, has to be imported (at great cost) from Switzerland, and requires a fair number of bureaucratic hoops to be jumped through to access (although this last barrier has been recently lowered). Hydromorphone has none of these issues.

For example, pretend you're a drug-naive member of the public, and you see one of these two headlines:

"New Ottawa initiative will allow homeless drug users to inject prescription opioids"

"New Ottawa initiative will allow homeless drug users to inject prescription heroin"

Which one is more likely to fill you with moral outrage?

 

['medicine cabinet']

This is good news. I hope all the haters a squirming in their pants...would they rather have addicts blasting in parks and under bridges? Their kids may find them, if you're walking a dog they tend to pick up all sorts of stuff..

This is a medical crisis, not criminal. Trying to police this away is akin to bailing out water with a pint glass on a boat in the middle of the ocean.

 

[Jabberwocky]

I shouldn't be surprised, but it was a little disheartening to say the least to hear Trump disregard his advisors' recommendations and just say he's going to push for tougher enforcement and prevention menthods. Sigh...