Province continues to monitor opioid crisis

PREMIER ACKNOWLEDGES NEEDS OF THE CITY

Alberta Premier Rachel Notley said the provincial government will continue to monitor the opioid crisis.

She didn’t commit new funding to a safe sobering centre for Lethbridge, but did reaffirm the knowledge of the current needs in the city.

“We’ll have more to say in time to come,” said Notley while in Lethbridge Thursday for the opening of Legacy Regional Park.

“We are very, very focused on looking at this issue. We understand that this community is under some stress. We are paying a great deal of attention to it. We are working at it within government to come up with some solutions and some proposals that we can then engage with the community leaders on in the very near future.”

Earlier Thursday, she also had a closed-door meeting with Mayor Chris Spearman and several members of council to discuss the “best path forward.”

“The premier was certainly listening intently; she took the issue seriously,” Spearman said. “She said that she wasn’t going to make a knee-jerk decision. And I respect her for that. But there does need to be that co-ordinated, holistic approach. I’m optimistic we will get supports.”

Notley said funding will continue for the supervised consumption site. Plus the government recently allocated more money for needle pickup and addiction treatment beds in the area, with more beds coming to Chinook Regional Hospital in September

“We know all of that is part of a range, a path, of solutions. It’s not one piece that you can pull out. It’s all part of a larger thing,” Notley said.

“We’re absolutely looking at the whole range of support that we can provide to the community as it deals with a problem that we know is very significant across the province, but particularly moving from west to east — the prevalence of addictions, but also the prevalence of particularly dangerous drugs, which cause a huge spike in fatalities.”

The premier also said the government established an emergency opioid response commission last year, with experts in health care, addictions treatment and law enforcement, who all provided recommendations.

“We know that people in the city are concerned about the frequency of finding needles,” Notley said.

“We also know that the way to reduce that and reduce their distribution, as well as reduce the incidents of drug overdose and drug addiction, is to build a model that is focused on both harm reduction and as well as treatment. That’s what we’re going to continue to

work on.”

“In our conversation today, we did talk to the premier about having a full plan to address the drug issue,” Spearman said.

“Safe sobering, to get addicts into programs, into supportive housing, to get them off the drugs — that’s the pieces that are missing. That was identified back in 2015 in the provincial mental health study — that Lethbridge lacks for those services,” he continued.

“It’s very important that we have

that holistic approach, that we have all the supports we need to deal with this problem. It’s our numberone priority. City council has to come back together, the community has to come back together — we have to identify solutions and the provincial government is an important partner in that process. It’s important that the premier know how important that problem is to the city of Lethbridge and our citizens and our council.”

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