I was hoping I could hear Dr. Wood answer his part of the question.
I just wanted to focus on something here. I'm not a member of this committee, but I saw that you're studying the opioid crisis, so I want to go back to the issue. I think I am in full agreement with Dr. Wood that we need to look at this from a public health point of view and then, of course, see what happens when people are in treatment. How do you support them, how do you rehabilitate and house them, and how do you provide all of those kinds of support systems that need to be there to back them up once they've been treated?
I just want to quickly say, because I don't want to use up all my time, that Jenny Kwan and I were ministers who were in charge of the Vancouver agreement, out of which came the safe injection site, and this came out of an evidence base that had happened in Europe that dealt with some of the issues. We were dealing with people who were dying. What are we dealing with now if a thousand people in British Columbia die from an overdose this year? If that happened because of bacteria, a virus, or tainted meat, we would be rushing around trying to stop it.
I want to talk about all of those elements. What do you do immediately to stop those deaths? I think you can't measure deaths on a level unless you think that people who die because of substance abuse are not worth it, that it's okay for them to die. We're talking about deaths. We're talking about stopping deaths. We're talking about preventing disease. That's a public health piece.
I would like Dr. Wood to tell me what he thinks we should be doing immediately, right now. I reiterate the question that Bill C-2 has stopped people from accessing this immediate treatment of stopping overdose deaths, which is what we intended to do, and we were very successful. People's lives were saved.
What other things, Dr. Wood, do we need to do on an immediate basis? You talked about the long term and the medium base, which is the training of doctors and looking at clinical guidelines. What are the immediate things we need to do—now—to stop real people from dying? What can we do now?