The health system in Vancouver is prescribing legal heroin in order to save the lives of addicts as explored in a recent BBC News special report.
Jeremy Cooke visits Vancouver and speaks to doctors, health officials and addicts themselves about receiving prescribed legal heroin, using safe injection sites to use their own drugs under supervision and discusses their horrific experiences on the streets as an opioid addict.
Safe injection sites which were initially started illegally by the community became a “prototype for the official public health programme” according to Jeremy Cooke and are now prevalent across the Downtown Eastside area of the Canadian city. Users bring their own drugs and are free to use the illegal substance without persecution. Here, Jeremy Cooke meets a veteran of the Afghanistan war named Jamie who since returning from combat, has fallen into heroin abuse, prison and homelessness interchangeably.
Jamie says, “it’s pretty wild, I’ve never seen so much death other than when I was in the military, deployed”. He later revealed that he has overdosed on drugs a total of eight times. Like others in the report, Jamie was saved by Narcan, an opioid antidote which under the city’s health policy, is freely available to all who are struggling with addiction and is used by medically trained staff to reverse a lethal overdose.
Dr Scott Macdonald who runs a clinic where addicts can be prescribed the medical and legal equivalent of heroin spoke out against critics of the Vancouver system and said, “When somebody is using opioids daily, there is a huge cost to society in the criminal justice system, court costs, policing costs, transmission of infectious diseases, and all of that can be reduced”.
Jeremy Cooke later met a couple who since taking the legally prescribed equivalent to heroin following a dark period of dependence on the illegal street version, have now moved into an apartment following homelessness and are planning a future in education and employment.
In the last two years, there have been over 8,000 recorded deaths from opioid overdose in Canada. The issue is commonly described as a “crisis” by American and Canadian news media.
Watch the special news report below, here on GRM Daily.