North America’s First Heroin Prescription Program Introduced in Canada

http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2054.cfm

Am Johal
Worldpress.org contributing editor
Vancouver, British Columbia
March 26, 2005



In February, Vancouver became the first city in North America to begin clinical trials for heroin prescription. This step, which required an exemption of Section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, came a year and a half after Vancouver had opened North America’s first safe injection site.

Dr. David Marsh, a clinical associate professor in the Department of Healthcare and Epidemiology at the University of British Columbia, says, “Each research subject will be on either heroin or another approved treatment substitute such as methadone.” According to him, Switzerland and the Netherlands have already approved regular treatment with heroin maintenance as part of the continuum of care after over 20,000 patient years of research. Marsh himself has worked for eight years in Canada to have the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (Naomi) study approved.

Writing in the Vancouver Sun, some addicts in the community have criticized parts of the study, which requires participants to give urine samples and reveal their medical histories and criminal records if they have one. They feel that there are too many barriers to enter the program and that it does not include enough participants.

The site is located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood, in the downtown peninsula, not far from where the Olympic games will take place in 2010. It is near the existing health-board-managed safe injection site where users bring in their own drugs from the street. The purity of heroin available on the street has been an issue in the past and was deemed to be a contributing factor in many overdose deaths.



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We have a problem here.

I went to a washroom in East Vancouver yesterday. It's a rougher part of town, but not nearly as bad as the Downtown Eastside. The light was a very dim and blue to make it more difficult for junkies to shoot up. The place looked like something you'd find in a prison, not a Safeway.

Vancouver is one of the mildest cities in the country, so we have more than our fair share of homeless people. At least they're trying to address the problem.

The Olympic comment is purely sensational. There are no venues in that part of downtown.

The pharmaceutical industry is glad to see us use a synthetic opiate, methadone, instead of heroin and methadone is addictive too. This should illustrate to people that heroin is not a deadly killer like alcohol and tobacco. It is poverty and the black market including inflated prices that bring great harms to people. It is the criminal justice model with its well-recognized failure at reducing the harms of substance abuse that prevents addicts from coming foward and asking for help.