Thank you very much.
Thank you to all the witnesses for being here today, especially to you, Ms. Giudice-Tompson, for reminding us how personal this issue is. You spoke about your son, and I'm sure that's not easy to do in a formal parliamentary committee and so on, so thank you for sharing your story.
There are a couple of things I want to try to tackle here. It is becoming clear at least to me that the line of what's deemed legal or illegal is very blurry. Clearly we're dealing with substances here that are addictive. Many of you have mentioned opioids, whether they're obtained through “legal means” or illegal means.
I find it ironic that when a substance is deemed illegal, a common response has been to say that we should just ban it, yet when there's a medical purpose, we can understand that even though there are a lot of risks with that particular drug, whether it's OxyContin or something similar to that, there are legitimate medical uses. It requires us to think of a response that is thoughtful and comprehensive and not just a blanket prohibition through which we think we're solving the problem.
I'd like to tackle the idea that somehow outright banning is going to work. I wonder what kind of approach we should be taking. We used to have what we called the four pillar approach for addiction issues when it came to drugs. Those were prevention, treatment, enforcement—enforcement was an element—and harm reduction. Those have now been narrowed down to exclude harm reduction. It seems to me that this sort of approach based on a public health understanding of what we're facing is what we need.
I wonder, Mr. MacPherson and Dr. Selby, if you could respond to that. As a committee, when we're looking at how the government should approach this, do we need to be taking a public health approach in terms of reducing risk and reducing harm as opposed to saying that an outright ban on whatever it is will somehow work? I think we're hearing that if we go down that line, something else will pop up. It really does make us think about what approach will work and what approach won't work. I wonder if you could respond to that.
Mr. MacPherson, I'd also like you to explain a little bit more about making naloxone more available. You said there are some barriers or difficulties. This is something that will prevent overdoses, so I just wonder what the problem is in obtaining naloxone and if you could explain that.