Health committee  That's a good question and, of course, you want to take into account the folks who are working there and their health. I haven't given this thought. I think I would want to think about this a little bit. Certainly low barrier treatment is what we need. The more barriers you put

Health committee  I might just add one thing. Certainly, we have heard police officers here in B.C. say, “We can't arrest ourselves out of this situation.” Our public health folks here in B.C. certainly have the same perspective: As my Oregon colleague mentioned, substance use disorder is a chron

Health committee  Yes, even if we save 10%, that's 150 people.

Health committee  Without a doubt. People who are suffering are criminalized and it doesn't help them. It fills the jails. It fills the courts. It gives the police way more work than they want, and at the end of the day it doesn't help them.

Health committee  Certainly, one of the outcomes we see from substance use is folks living very marginalized lives. When they are in the throws of addiction or problematic substance use, they have marginal housing, they have no income and they have very little resources, so the infants of women wh

Health committee  As I alluded to earlier, illicit drugs are manufactured in clandestine labs. Fentanyl primarily comes over from China, we believe. As you know, very small doses are needed compared with the amount people would have taken when they were using heroine. We believe that, for some rea

Health committee  It would laudable for the federal government to take a very health-focused approach, recognizing that problematic substance use is a disease. People come to problematic substance use for a number of reasons: childhood traumas, as Dr. Burgess mentioned, which we see a great deal o

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

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  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  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.