B.C. asks Ottawa for help with fentanyl battle
Province wants federal agencies to aid crackdown
• British Columbia is asking the federal government to help it crack down on fentanyl overdoses that have been classified a public health emergency in the province.
Premier Christy Clark wants the federal government to restrict access to devices, such as pill presses and tableting machines, and to pursue stronger penalties against people who import and traffic in fentanyl.
Clark also wants Ottawa to ask the Canada Border Services Agency to search small packages for fentanyl to stop the drug coming into the country.
The B.C. government announced Wednesday the formation of a joint task force to combat the recent rise in illicit-drug overdoses.
Clark said the newly formed Joint Task Force on Overdose Response will be headed by Provincial Health Officer Dr. Perry Kendall and director of police services Clayton Pecknold. They’ll be tasked with providing leadership and advice to the province to bolster overdose response and prevention measures in B.C.
The new task force will work closely with the B.C. Drug Overdose and Alert Partnership and police agencies to improve upon actions already in place to prevent overdoses.
B.C. Health Minister Terry Lake said he believes if it were any other type of public health emergency, federal resources would be made immediately available.
“To draw an analogy, if this was SARS or Ebola, Health Canada and border security and immigration would all be focused on this as a health issue that is essentially like a pandemic,” Lake said.
“So I think, when we put our minds to it, we can do those things, even though they seem difficult.”
Recent statistics from the coroner’s service in B.C. show there were 371 deaths in the first six months of this year, about a 74 per cent increase compared with the same period last year.
The service says the proportion of deaths where fentanyl was detected in toxicology tests jumped to about 60 per cent and that the drug was either used alone or in combination with other drugs.
British Columbia declared a public health emergency in April when overdose deaths surged to an alarming rate in the first few months of this year.
Clark said the province is also planning to improve access to treatment programs including its opioid substitution program.
“Drug overdoses are absolutely senseless deaths, every one of them is a preventable tragedy that families feel in the worst possible way,” she told a news conference at a hospital in Vancouver on Thursday.
“Some have lost their lives to a tainted pill at a party, they didn’t know what they were taking. Others were taken by that needless burden of addiction that they can’t kick. We need to support all of them.”
The B.C. Centre for Disease Control also released measures it believes will help tackle the problem after a meeting between public health officials and the coroner’s service.
It wants to expand the availability of naloxone to reverse overdoses, expand access to opioid substitution treatments like Suboxone and methadone, and to increase checks on street drugs, among other things.
A testing service will also be established to help drug users determine if their drugs contain adulterants such as fentanyl.
The fentanyl crisis is almost certain to be on the agenda at an opioid summit scheduled for the fall which will bring together players from across Canada.
Earlier this week Health Minister Jane Philpott, a physician herself, said Canada was suffering a national public health crisis as the number of overdoses and opioid-related deaths continued to grow.
IF THIS WAS SARS OR EBOLA, HEALTH CANADA AND BORDER SECURITY AND IMMIGRATION WOULD ALL BE FOCUSED ON THIS AS A HEALTH ISSUE THAT IS ESSENTIALLY LIKE A PANDEMIC. — TERRY LAKE, BRITISH COLUMBIA HEALTH MINISTER