I completely agree. It's the stigma regarding addiction and the lack of acceptance of it as a medical condition that has resulted in chronic underinvestment in services for people living with addictions. All over Canada we are losing people who are very young to overdose.
We need investments within the health care system, which includes developing, for the first time, a comprehensive addiction system of care where we work up the silos, where prevention, treatment, harm reduction and recovery are all coordinated and people can access the system rather than consistently butt up against the system.
We need expanded access to pharmaceutical alternatives, given the fact that it's a poisoned drug supply. We need a real conversation, real consideration, regarding the decriminalization of drugs. We need to be able to fully move substance use out of the criminal justice system and treat it as the medical condition that it is.
Amendments regarding the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act are important. There were some really important amendments that were made at the beginning of COVID-19 to support people to access, for example, medications for opioid agonist treatment, so that was done quite quickly at the beginning of the pandemic. The revisiting of other ways that the CDSA can be amended to support people who are critically at risk for imminent death due to overdose is also really important in order for us to be able to have an addiction treatment system that people can come into.