Supervised drug sites not on Manitoba’s agenda

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This article was published 20/11/2016 (3026 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — Manitoba will improve its tracking of drug overdoses, expand access to the opioid-antidote naloxone and better monitor painkiller prescriptions.

The province made those commitments under a new national action plan in response to the opioid crisis.

Provincial Health Minister Kelvin Goertzen said Saturday the province isn’t looking to introduce a supervised drug-use site despite the fact the federal government intends to amend legislation to make it easier to establish them.

The British Columbia government has asked Ottawa to repeal the former Conservative government’s Respect for Communities Act, which makes establishing new, supervised drug-consumption sites almost impossible.

At the close of two-day national conference in Ottawa on the opioid crisis, federal Health Minister Jane Philpott said changes to that law are coming, possibly within weeks.

Goertzen said nobody has been pushing for a supervised drug-consumption site in Manitoba.

“We’ll see what the federal government brings forward, but there are no requests here,” he said.

With illicit drugs such as cocaine, heroin and marijuana increasingly showing up laced with opioids, safe-drug sites are being promoted as a way to curb the problem.

Goertzen said he would rather see an analysis about the effect of existing harm-reduction strategies, such as the Winnipeg Regional Health Authority’s safe needle-exchange program, before considering a supervised drug-consumption site.

The former federal Tory government was strongly opposed to safe-injection sites and fought against Vancouver’s Insite — the first site in Canada — all the way to the Supreme Court. It lost.

Goertzen wouldn’t say where he stands on the issue. He said Manitoba’s Progressive Conservative party is not the same as the federal Conservatives, and whatever decision is made about harm-reduction programs has to be made based on evidence, not ideology. He said what works in Vancouver might not be the best fit for Manitoba.

“I think the harm-reduction program that exists now has been well-received,” he said. “We’d want to see our own analysis and our own data and see if our own harm-reduction programs are working.”

Goertzen said there is no plan to launch a new analysis of the programs, although it may come as part of the province’s commitment to a national plan to combat the opioid crisis.

It’s estimated as many as 2,000 people may die of opioid-related overdoses in Canada this year, and the numbers are growing exponentially.

Philpott said Saturday the “numbers are indeed frightening.”

British Columbia, considered ground zero in Canada’s opioid problem, has had more than 600 overdose deaths this year, about 60 per cent of them related to opioids such as fentanyl. First responders are reviving dozens of people every day with naloxone, including in Winnipeg.

Manitoba is just starting to see alarming growth in fentanyl overdoses, but Goertzen said the fact the province hasn’t been hit as hard as other places yet doesn’t mean it can be complacent.

In Manitoba in 2014, there were seven deaths linked to fentanyl.

In 2015, that increased to about 18.

On Thursday, the chief medical examiner said there were nine confirmed cases of fentanyl-related deaths from January to May of this year. Another five deaths were related to carfentanil, an animal tranquilizer used to sedate elephants, which is 100 times more potent than fentanyl.

Three people in Winnipeg died last week in what is believed to be a fentanyl-related overdose. In October, two men were found dead in a car in the North End in what is suspected to be fentanyl overdoses.

Improving data collection on drug overdoses — fatal and non-fatal — is one of Manitoba’s priorities under a “joint statement of action to address the opioid crisis.”

The lack of solid data has hampered efforts to understand the depth of the opioid crisis.

Manitoba intends to roll out better access to the opioid-antidote naloxone early in the new year, making it more easily available in rural areas, not just in Winnipeg.

Across the country, there will be a push to improve prescribing practices of narcotics, including introducing new guidelines for when they shouldn’t be prescribed.

Canada has one of the highest rates of prescriptions for opioids in the world.

Nationally, the number of claims for prescription opioids under drug plans grew almost 33 per cent from 2006 to 2013. In Manitoba, it was slightly faster, growing at 35 per cent.

The federal government will publish a report on Canada’s opioid action plan no later than February and will update it every three months.

Provincial ministers are negotiating a new arrangement for health funding with the federal minister, emphasizing new money for mental health and addictions.

Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins said Canada has to do better at treating both problems.

“We need to reach the point in society and as a country where we treat individuals with mental illness and addiction no different than we would treat a cancer patient or a cardiac patient,” he said.

mia.rabson@freepress.mb.ca