Health committee  I don't know the exact numbers or percentages. What we do know in the United States.... There was an article by a couple of economists from Princeton, who were looking at the causes of death and saw that it was particularly white middle-aged men in America who had an increase in

Health committee  Yes, that's my understanding, and when people are faced with that physical pain and start thinking about—

Health committee  I'm not sure I'm the right person to answer your question because you're right, I am with the health authority. What I would say with regard to the idea of not criminalizing the end-users is that substance use disorder is certainly a chronic disease and, as we've talked about,

Health committee  The Oregon legislature is meeting right now and there's a bill that has been put forth by our governor that is specifically related to opioids. One of the primary points in this bill is to treat substance use disorder as a chronic disease. This means that even if people get in an

Health committee  I was going to comment on the first point. You had brought up the issue that I had talked about earlier, which is the “syndemic”. We don't compartmentalize many of these things, but we have to look at them as a whole. In Oregon, we've seen sharp increases in syphilis in general.

Health committee  Thanks for the question. There were actually a couple in there. One of them is that when we're talking about chronic pain in the United States, we also know—and we have an entirely different health care system than you do—that the amount of opioids being prescribed for pain in t

Health committee  Okay. Thank you. I mentioned the naloxone or the detox, making sure that it's not just addressing their overdose problem but linking that to housing and employment, and so on. One of the things that's a challenge for us here in Oregon is that while we have some urban centres su

Health committee  Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you all. I very much appreciate coming after my colleague in British Columbia, because many of the points she brought up are things I wanted to talk about as well. To start off, one of the really important things to understand is the impo