The latest beachhead in the battle against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s War on Drugs was launched this week by the Pivot Legal Society when hundreds gathered at Woodward’s to view a film and review the case for heroin-assisted treatment in Canada.
Given the cultural context in which we find ourselves, this treatment regime is counterintuitive. How can administering a drug help anyone reduce or eliminate their dependence on that drug?
Besides, heroin has been a demonized drug for the past century even though it is an opioid like morphine that shares no such reputation.
But it does work.
The film, a Danish documentary called Anyone for Coffee and Heroin, chronicles the lives of those who seek help for their addiction in a facility that dispenses heroin.
But unlike similar time-limited clinical trials that have taken place in Vancouver, Montreal and a number of locations in Europe, the Danish facility is a permanent treatment centre and was the first of its kind in the world. Others have since been opened elsewhere in Europe.
This Pivot initiative was prompted in reaction to steps taken by the federal Tories, not surprisingly, against the advice of their own public service scientists.
Vancouver has had two successful clinical trials regarding heroin treatment: the first between 2005 and 2008 called NAOMI (North American Opiate Medication Initiative) and the second, SALOME (the Study to Assess Long-term Opioid Maintenance Effectiveness) which is testing whether another opioid, hydromorphone (Dilaudid) is as effective as heroin. That test is ongoing.
Ironically, rather than conduct their own clinical trials, the Danes simply used the scientific evidence produced by NAOMI and SALOME and opened their permanent treatment center.
What the two trials here have in common, aside from verifying that for a small group of addicts heroin is the only substance that works to effectively control their habits so they can stabilize their lives, is the stark fact that once addicts go through the trials they are left to fall off a cliff; they are cut loose to return to the streets where they are likely to spiral back into a life of crime, potential disease and frequently homelessness.
To stop this cycle, or at least delay it, the medical personnel involved in these trials applied to Health Canada for permission to treat 21 graduates of their program with heroin for another three months.
One month ago, Health Canada said yes. One week later, on Oct. 3, federal Health Minister Rona Ambrose reversed that decision saying that she was closing a “loophole” in the federal legislations and declared: “We know the answer is not to treat heroin addiction with heroin.”
How the minister came to “know” this is a puzzle; it clearly isn’t evidence based. It’s simply the latest example of a government driven by ideology and that regularly sweeps facts aside. It’s behaviour by Harper and his crew that has caused them to bring international shame to Canada by muzzling their own scientists on a variety of matters from drug addiction to climate change and serves no other purpose than to cater to their conservative base.
This is the same government that pursued its ideological crusade and fought the existence of Insite, Canada’s only publicly accessible supervised injection site which is situated, incidentally, a few blocks from Woodward’s. They took that case all the way to the Supreme Court where they lost, costing taxpayers millions of dollars. Our highest court concluded that the activities of Insite were a matter of medical health and more correctly came under provincial jurisdiction.
The results in Denmark are similar to those we saw here since the establishment of Insite. Crime and public disorder have declined significantly.
In Denmark among those being treated, crime rates are down by 76 per cent. Prostitution has declined by 75 per cent as addicts no longer need to resort to selling their bodies to acquire drugs. And about 13 per cent of the clients who have been served by the five clinics now operating in that country are clean.
Sadly we can expect another expensive legal battle here over the Harper’s ideological fixation. As Pivot lawyer Scott Bernstein told the audience at that Danish film, “We can’t sit by and let these harmful regulations stand.” He’s right.
