Former safe supply program in city saved lives, new research says
Substance-users who got drugs vetted for fatal contaminants from a now-closed compassion club significantly reduced their overdose rates, keeping them alive during the fatal drug overdose crisis, says a University of B.C. professor involved in newly released research.
The findings, published Thursday in an international drug-policy research journal, tracked 47 participants of a compassion club run by the Drug User Liberation Front (DULF), which received Vancouver Coastal Health funding to test drugs in a University of Victoria lab before selling them to members in a Downtown Eastside storefront in Vancouver.
Between August 2022 and October 2023, researchers found non-fatal overdoses by club members were cut in half, compared with their lives before they had access to safe supply. And non-fatal overdoses requiring intervention from naloxone, an overdose-reversing treatment, decreased by nearly two-thirds.
No one had a fatal overdose. These results indicate that peerled groups that disperse safe drugs, without requiring a prescription, “have great potential to save lives,” said Thomas Kerr, a UBC medicine department professor and co-investigator of the study: The impact of an unsanctioned compassion club on non-fatal overdoses.
“This is really the first (academic research) of its kind,” he said.
DULF'S compassion club, though, was closed in October, after it lost government funding and police arrested two of its co-founders for buying the drugs it supplied from the dark web. DULF'S supporters, though, argued officials knew how the drugs were purchased — this information was shared with MLAS on a government committee in 2022 — and that the club was closed due to rising political backlash to harm reduction.
The shutdown forced the club's members to return to buying drugs on the street, where the poisoned supply has killed nearly 14,000 people since 2016, when B.C. declared a public health emergency.
B.C. was the first province in Canada to introduce a safer supply program, but it has limited scope: the pharmaceutical alternatives it prescribes can't replace street drugs for all users and less than 5,000 people have access to the program, when the coroner's service estimated there are 225,000 people in this province who use unregulated substances.
The peer-reviewed study proves, Kerr said, that testing and dispersing safe street drugs can reduce deaths, noting “what we've done to date has really failed to reach large numbers of people.”
Kerr doesn't think there are any other safe-supply compassion clubs in B.C., and is frustrated by the lack of support from some politicians for this model and other harm reduction initiatives.
“The response across the country can only be described as incrementalism: only small, tiny steps taken to address what is really a huge, huge problem,” he said. “The fact that we can just allow people to die in preventable ways like this is appalling, and it's shameful.”
Thursday's provincial budget contained no new money for new solutions to address the overdose crisis, or the often-related issues of mental health and homelessness. It did, though, pledge $215 million over three years to continue funding previously announced initiatives such as 2,500 treatment beds, 49 overdose prevention sites and crisis response teams.
When asked Thursday how the budget helps B.C.'S growing homeless population, Finance Minister Katrine Conroy said one way was continuing to fund 500 shelter spaces across the province.
B.C. Children's Representative Jennifer Charlesworth said she was disappointed that there was no new spending to address the overdose crisis or mental health, both issues that majorly impact youth.
“This toxic drug crisis has been brutal on kids ... And we've got significant increases in depression, anxiety and behavioural challenges POST-COVID,” she said. “But there was no increase in mental-health services.”
The Canadian Mental Health Association is grateful the budget continued to fund important programs, such as its peer-assisted care teams that can respond to crisis calls instead of police, said B.C. division CEO Jonny Morris. There has been a large surge in demand for mental-health services, though, so he added larger investments are needed, for example to provide more help for people with eating disorders or offer more free counselling.
“We would, of course, wanted to have seen more in this budget,” Morris said Thursday.