Substitution program for addicts met with mixed reactions

News that an Ottawa group is moving to start an opioid-substitution program — a form of supervisedinjection project — for city addicts is being applauded by another harm-reduction group that says it wants to follow suit.

Meanwhile, city police and the local city councillor say they need to find out more about the new program before commenting on it.

Ottawa Inner City Health is a not-for-profit that receives some provincial funding. It told the Citizen this week it wants to have a managed-opioid program running at the Shepherds of Good Hope in the ByWard Market by September.

It said efforts to launch the project have been sped up in response to the fentanyl crisis that’s sweeping the country. The program is meant to get addicts off street drugs that are increasingly being laced with deadly fentanyl.

Addicts would be prescribed the legal drug hydromorphone as a replacement for the street opioids. They would inject it or take it orally several times a day under supervision.

On Friday, the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre says it would like to follow Inner City Health’s lead.

The Sandy Hill centre received preliminary federal approval just last week for a supervised-injection site of a different stripe.

There, injection drug users inject their own illegal drugs under supervision in a sterile location.

There is some lingering confusion over the Inner City Health proposal and how it fits with the city’s drug strategy, Rob Boyd, director of the Sandy Hill CHC’s Oasis program, acknowledged Friday.

Boyd said the proposal would provide people with “another option that might be more acceptable to them” than the methadone or suboxone (buprenorphine) options currently available to Oasis clients.

“Some people don’t stabilize well with methadone, and the same with buprenorphine,” said Boyd. “So if we provide people with this as a third option, as has been the experience in Europe, you get more people into care, because it’s something more familiar, and it engages them into the routine of a structured treatment, and provides them with a way to transition away from supervised opioid injection to an oral formulation like methadone or suboxone.”

Ottawa Public Health voiced its support for the Inner City Health initiative, and ByWard Market BIA director Jasna Jennings likened the proposal to a managed alcohol program, calling it “a great step in the right direction to addressing people’s needs in an immediate and practical format.

“For the health of the community, any service that really tries to work to get people off street drugs is seen as a huge benefit,” she said.

Ottawa police declined comment “until such time as we have more information about the proposed program.”

Rideau-Vanier Coun. Mathieu Fleury was unavailable for comment. A spokeswoman said the councillor first learned of the proposal from the Citizen’s Thursday report, and has had no conversation with Inner City Health on the topic. “We want to inform ourselves before making any statement,” Fleury’s office stated.

Boyd said any confusion over the proposal is “understandable.”

“There’s a lot that’s happening very quickly, and there are different things layered over each other,” he said, making the distinction between a supervised injection site, which requires a federal exemption for users to bring their own illegal drugs to the facility, and the opioid substitution program, which requires no exemption, “Because these are legal drugs prescribed for them to use.”

Inner City Health executive director Wendy Muckle said their model is simply “providing a service to people who we already provide health care for,” and “prescribing a medication we already prescribe.” ahelmer@postmedia.com