Ottawa/CMEDIA: It was revealed reportedly by internal documents that in 2023 Health Canada was told by experts to support non-medical safe supply, such as legal and regulated compassion clubs.
Over 53,000 people across Canada have lost their lives since 2016 to a drug overdose, according to data from the Public Health Agency of Canada.
With an average of 18 people dying every day, the majority of these deaths have been from fentanyl — a synthetic opioid 100 times more potent than morphine that is used in hospital settings and to manage chronic pain — but manufactured illegally and sold on the streets.
To keep people away from the toxic street supply, in 2016, physicians from Vancouver to London, Ont., began prescribing hydromorphone tablets, also known by the brand name Dilaudid, to their patients in the hopes that a pharmaceutical drug with a predictable dose would be safer than street drugs laced with unknown quantities of the much more potent fentanyl.
Pandemic pushes governments to prescription pills
After developing guidelines for prescribing pharmaceutical alternatives to people with opioid use disorder, the number of clinicians in the the B.C. government prescribing hydromorphone tablets grew quickly and by late 2022, the pills were being dispensed to more than 4,000 British Columbians every month, according to surveillance data from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.
But the program didn’t work for everyone.
Experts’ advice not implemented
Health Canada has not made public any advice from the internal report that came from its committee of experts.
The fifth estate, however, has obtained unredacted copies of two final reports produced by the committee in 2023 with the experts’ calling on Health Canada to take action to expand safe supply.
Evidence of not implementing the committee’s recommendations by Health Canada was found by the fifth estate.
“It was kind of heartbreaking because we had solutions that were available. We had evidence that showed them and it was being ignored and it was incredibly frustrating,” said Jordan Westfall, who wrote a master’s thesis in 2015 about overdose prevention in British Columbia about the lack of support for options like injectable heroin and hydromorphone.
Co-chair of expert committee says evidence was ‘ignored’
One of the co-chairs of Health Canada’s expert committee on a safe supply of drugs, Westfall says evidence-based solutions were ignored by the federal government.
In an emailed statement to the fifth estate, Health Canada said that it “has considered the [Expert Advisory Group’s] work alongside other input received from provinces and territories, addictions medicine specialists, law enforcement and additional stakeholders in developing approaches to prevent overdose deaths.”
However, in 2022, Health Canada denied the founders of a Vancouver compassion club an exemption to the act. They were later arrested and charged.
