Government fentanyl? Vancouver experiment aims to stop overdoses
A city at the forefront of harm reduction has taken the concept to a new level in an effort to combat rising drug toxicity illicit.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The place where Chris gets his fentanyl is light and airy, all blond wood and exposed brick. Staff are friendly and knowledgeable about the power of pills they can crush, cook and inject.
Soft pop music played and an attendant sprayed a little of Covid-cautious spray on his seat before settling into a cabin one recent afternoon with a few red and yellow pills, a tourniquet, a small candle and a lighter.
"The best thing about it is the guarantee: I can come here four times a day and get it," Chris said. He no longer spends all his waking hours in a frantic scrabble of begging and "stuff" to scrape together the money needed to pay a dealer. He won't be arrested - and he won't overdose and die using a drug that isn't what it's sold for.
This fentanyl dispensary is legal, and Canada's public health system funds it.
This is the most recent and perhaps the most radical step in a city that has always been at the forefront of experimenting with "harm reduction," an approach to reducing death and serious illness from illicit drugs by making drugs safer for people who use them. Harm reduction, even in basic forms such as the distribution of clean needles, remains deeply controversial in the United States, although the concept has gained unstable support as overdoses rise, including from the Biden administration.
But the breadth of services and interventions from Vancouver is almost unimaginable in the United States, less than an hour's drive south. Supervised injection sites and biometric machines that dispense prescription hydromorphone dot the city center; naloxone kits, which reverse overdoses, are available free of charge at any pharmacy; last year, a major downtown hospital opened a safer use site next to the cafeteria, to keep drug-addicted patients out to avoid withdrawal.
And Since April, Chris, a nervous, soft-spoken 30-year-old man who wanted to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, has been given pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl through the dispensary , which sells to those who can pay and provides free drugs from the program's operational budget to those who cannot.
The new program aims to provide a more safe fentanyl available on the streets, where the increasingly deadly supply is responsible for most of the overdose epidemic that was declared a public health emergency here six years ago.
Dr. Christy Sutherland, the board-certified addiction medicine specialist who set up the program, said her goal was, first, to prevent people from dying and, second, to help bring about stability in their lives so they can think about what they might want. change.
Chris started using pills recreationally as a teenager, then moved on to heroin. But Vancouver's heroin supply was taken over a decade ago by fentanyl, an opioid 50 to 100 times more potent and therefore much more profitable for the cartels selling it.
A city at the forefront of harm reduction has taken the concept to a new level in an effort to combat rising drug toxicity illicit.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The place where Chris gets his fentanyl is light and airy, all blond wood and exposed brick. Staff are friendly and knowledgeable about the power of pills they can crush, cook and inject.
Soft pop music played and an attendant sprayed a little of Covid-cautious spray on his seat before settling into a cabin one recent afternoon with a few red and yellow pills, a tourniquet, a small candle and a lighter.
"The best thing about it is the guarantee: I can come here four times a day and get it," Chris said. He no longer spends all his waking hours in a frantic scrabble of begging and "stuff" to scrape together the money needed to pay a dealer. He won't be arrested - and he won't overdose and die using a drug that isn't what it's sold for.
This fentanyl dispensary is legal, and Canada's public health system funds it.
This is the most recent and perhaps the most radical step in a city that has always been at the forefront of experimenting with "harm reduction," an approach to reducing death and serious illness from illicit drugs by making drugs safer for people who use them. Harm reduction, even in basic forms such as the distribution of clean needles, remains deeply controversial in the United States, although the concept has gained unstable support as overdoses rise, including from the Biden administration.
But the breadth of services and interventions from Vancouver is almost unimaginable in the United States, less than an hour's drive south. Supervised injection sites and biometric machines that dispense prescription hydromorphone dot the city center; naloxone kits, which reverse overdoses, are available free of charge at any pharmacy; last year, a major downtown hospital opened a safer use site next to the cafeteria, to keep drug-addicted patients out to avoid withdrawal.
And Since April, Chris, a nervous, soft-spoken 30-year-old man who wanted to be identified only by his first name to protect his privacy, has been given pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl through the dispensary , which sells to those who can pay and provides free drugs from the program's operational budget to those who cannot.
The new program aims to provide a more safe fentanyl available on the streets, where the increasingly deadly supply is responsible for most of the overdose epidemic that was declared a public health emergency here six years ago.
Dr. Christy Sutherland, the board-certified addiction medicine specialist who set up the program, said her goal was, first, to prevent people from dying and, second, to help bring about stability in their lives so they can think about what they might want. change.
Chris started using pills recreationally as a teenager, then moved on to heroin. But Vancouver's heroin supply was taken over a decade ago by fentanyl, an opioid 50 to 100 times more potent and therefore much more profitable for the cartels selling it.
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