Harm reduction & Safe supply

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Overdose prevention centers (OPCs) are a proven harm‐​reduction strategy, begun in Switzerland in 1986. There are 147 sanctioned OPCs in 16 countries and 91 locations, including two in New York City, which announced they had reversed more than 1000 overdoses a year and a half after they opened. This saved the city millions of dollars in ambulance and emergency services.

“For young people, [they] often don’t have access to harm reduction services to the extent that older people have,” said DeBeck. “A lot of it is a reluctance to give them access to evidence-based harm reduction programs, I think out of fear that they might encourage substance use among young people or somehow send the wrong message.”

“The impact is that young people aren't given the protections that those evidence-based interventions can provide,” added DeBeck.

Safe supply programs provide prescribed medications as a safer alternative to the toxic illegal drug supply to people who are at high risk of overdose.

On the Government of Canada's website, it says safer supply services help save lives, stating, "Safer supply services can help prevent overdoses, save lives, and connect people who use drugs to other health and social services."

While Budget 2024 shows significant investments that benefit British Columbians, it lacks investments to help bring more safe drug supply to those who need them.

That is from senior economist with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives Alex Hemingway. He says that the province is making the right move in continuing to invest despite calls to slash spending and taxes.

“The government is saying ‘no, we’re going to focus on investing and meeting some of the big challenges that the province is facing,’ and we know there are many,” said Hemingway.

However, Hemingway says plenty is missing from the budget. The biggest among which is a lack of investment in providing more access to safe drug supply as the province goes through the toxic drug crisis.

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

Harm reduction is not a single method but rather a series of tools and public health interventions to help improve health through safety and dignity—in short, it incorporates empathy and reduces stigma to help guide individuals towards safer behaviors.4 Harm Reduction International, a non-governmental organisation focused on drug misuse, describes it as “policies, programmes and practices that aim to minimise the negative health, social and legal impacts associated with drug use, drug policies and drug laws . . . It focuses on positive change and on working with people without judgement, coercion, discrimination, or requiring that people stop using drugs as a precondition of support.”5 Examples include needle exchange schemes and provision of naloxone to reverse overdoses.Furthermore, harm reduction serves as a critical tool to improve education and awareness and to help guide decisions informed by risk awareness and mitigation, rather than shame.6 Using harm reduction strategies can counter the effect of stigma, which is a main hindrance for response to health crises such as that of opioid addiction.78

According to the results of a new research study carried out by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control (BCCDC), prescribing medical-grade opioids significantly reduced the numbers of both deaths and overdoses for B.C. residents.

Specifically, the study, published in the British Medical Journal, showed that individuals who were at risk of death related to illicit opioid use were 61% less likely to die from any cause in the following week if prescribed at least one day’s supply of a pharmaceutical alternative. Moreover, this study is also the first to examine the safer supply harms reduction strategy at a population level. It examined anonymized data from 5,882 participants diagnosed with either opioid or stimulant use disorder and who had filled a prescription for pharmaceutical-grade opioids as part of B.C.’s safer supply program between March 2020 and August 2021.

It was also found that the protective effect of the safer supply increased with the number of days opioid medications were accessed. Furthermore, individuals who received four or more days of prescription opioids were 9% less likely to die from any cause, and 89% less likely to die from overdose in the following week.

In the winter and spring, unhoused people in Vancouver struggle with something known anecdotally as “street feet.”

It happens when the rain soaks your socks and shoes and you’re unable to clean and dry your feet regularly, sometimes leaving them damp for months on end.

This leads to a condition that was first identified as “trench foot” and suffered by soldiers during the First World War.

The study, published this month in The Lancet, found a 67 per cent reduction in overdose deaths in neighbourhoods within 500 metres of supervised consumption sites after they opened. That reduction in mortality rippled as far as five kilometres from the sites.

Can cannabis offer a lifeline in the battle against drug addiction, particularly for those grappling with the perils of stimulants like crystal methamphetamine? New research from the University of British Columbia (UBC) suggests it might. The study, published in Addictive Behaviors, found that cannabis use is linked to a decrease in the use of crystal methamphetamine among individuals at high risk of overdose in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, an area severely impacted by illegal drug use.

PROVIDENCE – As Rhode Island is gearing up to open the country’s first state-authorized overdose prevention center, and with two publicly recognized programs in New York, researchers at the Brown University School of Public Health have created a set of resources to educate the public about these harm-reduction efforts.

All it takes is about five minutes and a sample "smaller than a chocolate chip" for harm reduction staff in Ottawa to know what's in the drugs someone is considering using at a supervised consumption site.

By comparison, public health officials in Belleville, Ont., a city still reeling from a recent overdose emergency, said they're not aware of any drug testing machines in Hastings and Prince Edward counties.

“He ingested a drug, and we don’t know what was in it,” she told SF Gate, adding: “One thing we do know, it was a drug.”

As a resident of Duncan I’m distressed about the rise in hateful rhetoric from groups such as Canadian Citizens Against Crime and Public Drug Abuse. Founder Travis Rankin has been quoted in several media outlets in the last few months, including this one, and now the rally the group is planning for Friday could have serious and dangerous consequences for our most vulnerable community members.

This protest is based in fear, not in facts. Rankin and his group equate drug use and homelessness with crime. Evidence demonstrates that unhoused people, people who use substances and people who experience mental illness are significantly more likely to be targets of crime, rather than perpetrators.