Drug-checking project widened to fight ODs
The provincial government has expanded a pilot project that tests illicit drugs for contaminants in an effort to prevent overdoses.
“We continue to grapple in British Columbia with the worst public health emergency that we’ve experienced in this province in decades,” Judy Darcy, the minister of mental health and addictions, said during a news conference in Vancouver.
“This is heartbreaking, it’s unacceptable, and it’s preventable.”
The province is testing whether making drug checking more widely available will help prevent overdose deaths. Drug checking has been taking place at Insite, the supervised consumption site in Vancouver, for the past year using fentanyl testing strips. It was expanded in September to the Powell Street Getaway and overdose prevention sites in Vancouver Coastal Health’s region.
The City of Vancouver gave $60,000 to the B.C. Centre on Substance Use to buy and operate a specialized drug-checking machine — called a Fourier-Transform Infrared Spectrometer — to evaluate the effectiveness of drug-checking services.
The portable machine, which went into operation last week, will be used along with fentanyl test strips to check drugs for a wide range of contaminants at Insite and Powell Street Getaway. It will be at Insite on Monday and Tuesdays from 2 to 8 p.m. and Powell Street Thursdays and Fridays from 10-3 p.m.
“This information will provide clients and also health authorities with information about the drugs people are using and the risks they can pose,” said Dr. Mark Lysyshyn, a medical health officer with Vancouver Coastal Health Authority.
Lysyshyn said the experience so far at Insite has shown that people who check their drugs are more likely to reduce their dose and are less likely to overdose. The ministry is also expanding the use of fentanyl test strips in all supervised consumption and overdose prevention sites in B.C.
Drug checking allows people to anonymously submit samples of street drugs to be analyzed for their chemical makeup. The new machine can test a range of substances, including opioids, stimulants and other psychoactive drugs, in a matter of minutes.
Drug users can then decide whether and how much to use.
“We see drug checking as another piece of the puzzle to address the overdose crisis,” said Vancouver Mayor Gregor Robertson. “We’ve lost far too many people and we have to take every step we can to save lives.”
B.C.’s chief health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, declared a public health emergency in April 2016 in response to the opioid deaths.
The B.C. Coroners Service released the latest overdose statistics on Thursday, revealing that 1,130 people have died from overdose in B.C. this year, compared to 607 at this time in 2016. There were 80 deaths from suspected drug overdoses in September, a 31-per-cent increase from the last year.
Fentanyl was detected in 83 per cent of overdose deaths this year, a 147-per-cent increase over the same period in 2016.