Opioid crisis emergency task force calls for safe supply of drugs

Vancouver’s mayor says he will direct staff to look for a site where drug users can get safe opioids to prevent overdoses as part of a plan recommended by an emergency task force calling for more services for people who are dying alone.

Kennedy Stewart said the number of overdose deaths has remained about the same as last year despite the best efforts of front-line workers, first responders and health professionals who seem to be fighting a losing battle.

“A long-standing mental health and addictions crisis combined with an increasingly potent drug supply means that unless we take urgent and bold action now, our friends, family and neighbours will continue to die,” Stewart told a news conference Tuesday.

He said he discussed Vancouver’s overdose crisis with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau about six weeks ago and he seemed to be sympathetic but the federal government must now provide some funding.

The B.C. Coroners Service recorded 369 deaths in Vancouver last year and by September this year, 297 people had died.

Stewart struck the task force last month shortly after taking office and it includes an addictions physician, housing advocates, first responders, First Nations and drug users’ groups.

Its recommendations include a new outdoor inhalation overdose prevention site, which Stewart said is essential because 40 per cent of overdoses are due to people inhaling drugs.

There will be “no end in sight” to the overdose crisis if the toxic drug supply, often tainted with fentanyl, is not addressed, Stewart said, adding the city would provide a site so a federally funded and approved research project headed by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control can go forward. Dr. Mark Tyndall, the centre’s executive medical director, wasn’t on the task force but he wants to provide hydromorphone pills early in 2019 and eventually make them available in vending machines.

Doctors are already prescribing the opioid but a public health approach is needed for drug users who typically crush the pills and inject them to get a quick high, Tyndall said in an interview Monday.

“Right now we’re asking people to go in back alleys and buy from gangsters and that just doesn’t make any sense this far into the epidemic. If the threat of death were enough to stop people from buying these drugs that would have happened by now.”

The centre is working with the College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C. and the province’s college of pharmacists to get exemptions from current regulations, Tyndall said.