Health committee  Yes, for sure. I mean, there are long wait times to use Insite. There are scientific papers showing that's among the reasons why people will go and inject in the alleys. Just to describe it for people, it is a horrible life, as my colleague has alluded to. People are using water

Health committee  From a prevention perspective, unfortunately the science doesn't point a clear path forward in terms of discussing with youth in high schools. Those types of interventions have traditionally been shown to be ineffective. But from a prevention perspective, certainly a national app

Health committee  I'll try to answer that as well as the earlier question in terms of success and where we should be investing. First, these programs are not clinical trials, so we have to look at data on deaths and things like that. To give people context, when Insite opened, it was in the mids

Health committee  Really, what we need, as we have for other diseases, is a stepped care model. Some people who are opioid-addicted actually don't need Suboxone. They don't need a medication. By going to a peer support meeting or going into a recovery program, they will go into long-term recovery.

Health committee  No, but I think it would help if we addressed regulatory issues there, because we've seen this shift toward fentanyl. The average patient of mine is not looking for fentanyl. Fentanyl is a market force. People with a background in economics can understand that it's cheaper, it ca

Health committee  I'm happy to. First of all, the number of injections are not unique individuals. Insite isn't for everybody. The people who use it tend to be homeless, street-entrenched, and live within a couple of blocks. In the Downtown Eastside, it's estimated there there are only about 4,700

Health committee  In terms of your first question, Onsite is located in the Downtown Eastside, so you're exactly right: it's a place where people in crisis, whose lives really are a living hell, see the opportunity for something else. They get a bed, but then what next? Obviously we want to get pe

Health committee  My biggest philosophical comment would be how counterproductive it can be to pit public health interventions against medical treatments and recovery interventions, because they don't need to be viewed in opposition or as isolated interventions. I'm very sympathetic to my collea

Health committee  I think there is a lot of consensus in the room. Through the college of family physicians federally, really ensure that part of the curriculum includes the prevention and treatment of addiction. I don't want to bash specialists—I'm a specialist myself—but this disease is so com

Health committee  I'm happy to speak to that. It has been well documented, and there are lawsuits for hundreds of millions of dollars in the United States because of the shenanigans of the makers of OxyContin. As I alluded to, there was a void in physician knowledge. This promotion of pain as a f

Health committee  Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Evan Wood. I'm a professor of medicine at the University of British Columbia, where I hold a tier 1 Canada research chair. I'm also an addiction medicine physician and medical director for addiction services at Van