Innovative study to inform province’s meth strategy

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 25/08/2019 (1950 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A crisis of the magnitude of meth addiction demands more than a quick solution — it needs an informed one, as well.

And simply put, the political parties that have pledged in the current provincial election campaign to set up a stand-alone treatment facility for methamphetamine users have little understanding of the realities that underpin those promises.

Medical professionals who work on the front line of the war against meth are still gathering the data necessary to determine whether a facility of this kind can work.

The parties that have weighed in on this issue — Liberals, New Democrats and Progressive Conservatives — do have the best of intentions, and they should be lauded for pledging to address the meth crisis with something more meaningful than group hand-wringing. However, they are all promising to do something that medical professionals are not yet convinced can be done.

The good news is we should soon have the results of a groundbreaking study on meth users that will help Manitoba politicians make an informed decision on the feasibility of a stand-alone treatment facility which could divert less dangerous meth users from overwhelmed hospital emergency departments.

A joint undertaking of the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service and Shared Health, the province’s principal agency for oversight of the health-care system, will look closely at meth users who have come into contact with first responders and then track them through the treatment process. When the data are collected, the study’s authors hope they will know how to better screen meth users to determine which are sick or violent enough to warrant a stay in a hospital, and which ones can be safely diverted to a stand-alone facility.

Chief among the challenges presented by meth is the almost complete unpredictability of its effect on users. The potency and constituent elements that go into what we know as meth can vary wildly. As a result, even frequent users can have dramatically different experiences, depending on how the meth was cooked and what elements were used to “cut” or dilute it for street sale.

This makes treatment a challenge. Most meth users who come into contact with paramedics end up in the hospital system because there is nowhere else to take them, and because no one is quite sure how they will react during withdrawal. Some users are quite docile; others can be volatile and violent. Without some sort of protocol for screening and assessing meth patients, it would be impossible to safely divert any of them to a non-hospital facility.

That’s what makes the WFPS/SH study — believed to be the first of its kind in Canada — so important. Data on more than 1,500 meth users treated by first responders over a one-year period will be used to inform treatment decisions. Users will be tracked from ambulance through to emergency department and hospital admission. Health-care professionals will gain new insight into symptoms and the efficacy of different treatments, including the early use of the antipsychotic medication olanzapine, to see if it is possible to screen out lower-risk users.

The results should be available by early next year, and will certainly help inform the decisions of the party that forms government after the Sept. 10 provincial election. It will also elevate the level of political discussion related to responses to the meth crisis.

The study didn’t arrive in time to stop the provincial parties who are currently campaigning from making uninformed promises. But it will be available in time to help the next Manitoba government do the right thing.