Health committee  Good morning. Thank you for having me. It will be a challenge to confine my remarks to 10 minutes, because there's so much to say about this crisis that is happening, but I will do my very best. I'm going to tell you a little bit about the coroners service's investigation so you

Health committee  We would recommend more regulation of the precursors, the sorts of chemicals that combine to make these drugs, and drug regulation of those. Regulation around commercial pill presses, those—

Health committee  Okay. Sorry. The commercial pill presses need to be regulated. We would advocate a good Samaritan law, which I believe has been introduced in the House. It's a small measure, but it will be a health response to overdoses. Police will no longer come, and that's focusing on the

Health committee  Absolutely. I heard our Minister of Public Safety say recently that we cannot arrest ourselves out of this situation. We know that approach—the shaming, blaming, and arresting of people—has not worked. It significantly has not worked. In fact, the deaths and rates of overdose

Health committee  Before I answer that, I'd like to emphasize that we have a dearth of research in this area. We do not have evidence across the country as to exactly who's dying, when they're dying, and why they're dying. We don't know, for example, how many people who are currently dying were pr

Health committee  We don't collect data around ethnicity, so I can't tell you that. We have started collecting data for the First Nations Health Authority in British Columbia, so we will be able to report at some point about the number of first nations people or indigenous people who are dying. Th

Health committee  You only have a problem if you know you have a problem. That's my first response. The B.C. Coroners Service has adopted a fairly risk-tolerant approach to reporting this data. We get the data within 48 to 72 hours, and we are reporting these deaths monthly. You will not see that

Health committee  That's a very good question. There's a drug treatment court in Vancouver, and I haven't seen the data coming out of that. I know anecdotally from those who work in that field that they believe it's very successful. I can tell you, I have worked in the provincial correction syste

Health committee  Yes. First of all, and I don't want to harp on this, but we need to establish criteria, because we don't even know if we're talking about the same thing across the country. Is the data that Ontario is collecting around fatalities the same data that B.C. is collecting and the same

Health committee  We need a definition that is standard, and I think it will require federal leadership to say here's the definition for the information we want to collect, and then the provinces and territories will start to collect it.

Health committee  Again, I would say that we need to have a definition. What is a drug overdose? Is it a prescribed overdose? Is it an illicit opioid overdose? Is it a cocaine overdose, a stimulant overdose? Those are all different substances and they have different solutions.

Health committee  Hello. Thank you. I did prepare a slide presentation. Unfortunately, there wasn't time to translate it. Some of you may have it. I'm not going to refer to it greatly because numbers are not very interesting when a person is talking. I'm just going to basically tell you the story

Health committee  The B.C. Centre on Substance Use has proposed what they're calling a “heroin compassion club”. It could be modified for other substances. This approach makes people afraid because I think their first reaction is, you're going to give illicit drugs to people. What it does is provi

Health committee  They would pay a modest fee. They would live. They would be provided with support and services, and they could see a way out to make their lives better, because to continue to force people to buy drugs off the street just leads to disease, disaster and death.

Health committee  Yes, absolutely. In B.C. we have an expedited toxicology policy, whereby the provincial toxicology centre will turn around toxicology results for us in 48 hours. It's the only service of its kind in Canada. We've worked with the lab for a number of years to get that in place. Onc