Experts urge health crisis declaration due to opioids
Members of the medical community and front-line workers in Canada’s opioid crisis are pressing the federal government to declare a national public health emergency.
Dr. David Juurlink, head of pharmacology and toxicology at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre, says the problem is so dire, it demands an urgent response at the highest levels of government.
Politicians are meeting public health experts, doctors and family members who have lost loved ones at a two-day summit in Ottawa on Friday and Saturday to hash out a solution to escalating — and deadly — rates of drug addiction.
Declaring a public health emergency would empower chief medical officers to take the actions necessary to reduce harm, Juurlink said. The federal New Democratic Party is calling on the federal government to do the same.
The meeting is being co-chaired by federal Health Minister Jane Philpott and Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins, both of whom are doctors themselves.
Declaring an emergency “takes out of the political realm the singular job of protecting public health and gives it to the people who are tasked with and empowered to do that,” Juurlink said.
There is clear consensus that leadership and effective co-ordination at the federal level would have a major impact on reducing overdose deaths in Canada, said NDP health critic Don Davies.
“We urge the federal government to take immediate action to help save lives,” he said.
The federal government is exploring every lever at its disposal to address the issue, Philpott said Friday.
“If there are tools that are available to me that we believe will be helpful, I will find the authority and go through the appropriate steps to be able to access those tools,” she said.
“If we determine this is an appropriate tool, certainly we would do so.”
There is no question the opioid issue is a national public health crisis, she added.
Philpott has admitted she is unhappy with a lack of data and surveillance programs that could show how many opioids are prescribed, where they are coming from and how many people are overdosing and dying.
However, the problem requires a concerted, multi-pronged approach among multiple jurisdictions and won’t be solved overnight, she warned.
“By working together to develop a national response to this crisis, we have an incredible opportunity to pool our knowledge, our experiences and the lessons learned and help to save the lives of people across this country suffering from opioid addiction,” Hoskins said.
Canada has the world’s secondhighest per capita consumption of prescription opioids, said Philpott, noting in some parts of the country, drug overdoses are killing more people than motor vehicle accidents.
B.C. Premier Christy Clark is also pressing Ottawa to take steps to stop the flow of fentanyl from China.
The province’s medical health officer, Dr. Perry Kendall, said this week a record-number of fatal overdoses have officials in several B.C. cities urging the federal government to approve facilities where drug use is supervised and overdoses can be reversed.
They are needed because drugs such as fentanyl are becoming increasingly toxic, and addicts and recreational drug users often don’t know their “party drugs” are cut with fentanyl.
“The lethal dose of fentanyl is about 100 times less than the lethal dose in volume of morphine. So 200 mg of morphine would likely kill you, and two mg of fentanyl will kill you,” he said.
“Then we have carfentanyl, which is maybe 50 times more toxic than that. Then we have W18, which is another synthetic analog, which has been discovered in some places in Canada, and is perhaps 80 times more toxic than fentanyl.”