Health committee  In terms of naloxone, there are two forms. There's the injectable form and now there's the nasal spray form. We did take steps to make both forms available without a prescription, which significantly aided access. Naloxone was already being used in such areas as supervised inject

Health committee  I'll take the first part of the question. If we have clear information on what the risks are, then you can have appropriate strategies. You're correct that for different circumstances there would be different strategies. The situation in Canada is more complicated than that beca

Health committee  Well, from the Health Canada perspective, because we're the ones who actually authorize the medications, our goal is to make sure that people have accurate and adequate information to be able to make those decisions. When I went through medical school, we were very trepidatious

Health committee  The special access program, as you've said, is intended for emergency and life-threatening conditions. An individual physician comes in and makes a request for an individual patient and it's assessed as such. When requests come in, we do look at the information that the physician

Health committee  In terms of the authorizations in Canada for opioids, they're a marketed product. So if there was a situation where there was an adulteration or contamination, we would embark upon an assessment to see what the risks associated with that would be. Then we would look at whether or

Health committee  Once we know what the risk is and what the action is, we make a decision about what the most appropriate form of communication is. Again, that could be putting something out on the web. It could be a news release. It really depends, on a case-by-case basis, on what the risks are

Health committee  Perhaps I could take that. SALOME was a study to assess long-term medication opioid use. The aim of the study was to compare the use of injectable pharmaceutical grade heroin or diacetylmorphine with the use of hydromorphone, an injectable form of a pain medication that's approv