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Addictions

Alberta and opioids III: You can’t always just stop

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29 minute read

Monty Ghosh at Highlevel Diner, May 30.                                                                            Photo: Paul Wells

This is the concluding installment in a series on drugs in Alberta. Previously:

i. “Worse Than I’ve Ever Seen,” June 4

ii. “Alberta’s System Builder,” June 7


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A matter of expectations

Street family

My tour guide for much of my visit to Edmonton was Dr. Monty Ghosh, a clinician who’s on faculty at the University of Calgary and the University of Edmonton. He seems to talk to everybody who works with substance users in Alberta, from his own patients to front-line clinicians to the Alberta government. His relations with the latter go up and down, but he urged me to talk to Marshall Smith, the chief of staff to premier Danielle Smith.

On my first night in Edmonton Ghosh walked me around a neighbourhood that included the George Spady Society  supervised-consumption site, the Hope Mission’s Herb Jamieson Centre, and the Royal Alexandra Hospital, which has a supervised-consumption service on its premises.

A lot of people use the services these places provide. Other people don’t. Shelters in particular are tricky: they’re usually for single people who arrive alone. “The Hope, the Herb, the Navigation Centre, offering the world,” one Edmonton Police Service officer told me. “But all these places have one thing in common: rules.” If you have a spouse or a pet, you want to keep your drug supply or you want to stay close to your “street family” — the community spirit in neighbourhoods like this is striking, and might be surprising to people who prefer to stay away — a shelter’s probably not for you.

Several of the places we visited weren’t ready to welcome us when we showed up unannounced. To say the least, they’re busy. That was the case at Radius Community Health and Healing, an institutional building in a more residential part of the neighbourhood. Radius is a drop-in clinic and, as we’ll see, quite a bit more.

On a sunny weekday afternoon, more than a dozen people stood, sat or lay on the building’s front steps and truncated lawn. One lay on his back, shirtless, not moving visibly. Ghosh asked the man whether he was all right, asked again, finally nudged him. The man stirred, looked around. Ghosh apologized mildly for bothering him, then checked in on two other people who also weren’t moving. They turned out to be all right too.

Francesco Mosaico, Radius’s medical director, was on his way home for the day when we arrived, but we made plans to talk the next day. When I returned, I met Mosaico and Radius’s executive director, Tricia Smith, in her office.

I think it’s important to hear them out, because when drug use becomes the object of political debate, it’s natural to talk as though policy decisions are the main thing keeping people from getting well. This can lead to a lot of blame on one hand, and to excessive optimism on the other. In fact the biggest thing that keeps people from getting well is often the entire sum of their lives until now, compounded by the influence of drugs that are more potent than anything earlier generations had to deal with.


The most complex patients

Radius offers primary care to people “experiencing multiple barriers,” Smith said. That can include homelessness, addiction, severe mental health problems, criminal records. The centre’s team includes 12 family physicians and three psychiatrists. They currently see about 3,000 patients.

Radius has Western Canada’s only non-profit dental clinic. The centre runs a respite program for people who are not sick enough to be in acute care but are too sick to be managing independently on their own. It has a program for pregnant women experiencing homelessness. It runs on a harm-reduction model, so they don’t need to be drug-free to go into the program. It has an interdisciplinary Assertive Community Treatment team to help people with mental-health and substance problems find and stay in market apartments, with frequent assistance. There’s a supervised consumption site in the basement.

“In fact,” Smith said, “we actually have an exemption from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Alberta to filter out and keep the most complex patients. The least complex, we refer elsewhere.” I couldn’t get care in Radius if I tried; they’d politely refer me elsewhere. They’re for the people who need the most help.

After my visit, Smith wrote to me to add another program to the list: Kindred House, which for more than 25 yearss has supported women and Trans women sex workers. “The women we see are from age 18 to 50, predominantly Indigenous, have intergenerational trauma, past/current trauma, substance use issues, often houseless or couch surfing,” Smith wrote.

Smith has been at Radius for three and a half years. While I was there, I asked her how work at Radius is going. “It’s going fabulously, honestly,” she said. She arrived early in the COVID pandemic, after eight years in Alberta government departments — which in turn followed 20 years as a Canadian Forces army nurse, including in combat zones. “I’m in the right place,” she said of Radius. “It felt like coming home.”

How come? “The staff, the team, the work, the dedication. It just feels like family. I missed that. Being in the military was a big thing. This work that this group does is just really amazing. The team is amazing and it’s hard, but it’s good work.”

And how’s the workload evolving? “Unfortunately, for this population, the struggles are only increasing, and the number of individuals that are experiencing those challenges is not getting less,” she said. “The workload isn’t going anywhere. It’s getting more difficult.”

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“Especially in the last couple years, I don’t think things have ever been worse for the vulnerable population,” Mosaico, Radius’s medical director, added. The same housing crunch that has made homes less affordable for everyone has put thousands of the most vulnerable on the street. Results: more frequent frostbite or burns from lamps lit to keep from freezing. Body lice. Trauma from watching friends die. And to Mosaico’s astonishment, frequent shigella outbreaks.

“Shigella’s a bacteria that causes torrential bloody diarrhea. It can be treated with a single dose of antibiotics. But if you’re homeless and you don’t have a place to take care of yourself… 70 percent of the cases have had to be hospitalized in the last two years…. I mean, they’re talking about potentially calling it an endemic disease, and it’s a disease of destitution. You see it in refugee camps in developing countries, not in the capital of Alberta, you know?”

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Ten thousand times deadlier

Radius also works closely with the Alberta government to integrate its services with the “recovery-oriented system of care” that I told you about last week. There are two Radius staffers working at the Integrated Care Centre the police set up to replace the old, passive holding cells for overnight detention. There are two more at the Navigation Centre, which steers people toward social and government services. If there’s an Alberta model, they’re part of it. So I was fascinated by the response when I asked my hosts the basic question that sent me to Alberta: Why are so many people dying?

“I think it’s the nature of the drugs,” Mosaico said. “You know, people used to overdose and die. But I’ve been here 17 years. I think in the first 10 or 11 years it wasn’t very common to hear about overdoses by opioids. Every once in a while you’d hear about it, but it wasn’t a daily thing. Whereas now with fentanyl and carfentanil, it’s really dangerous.”

Carfentanil is 10,000 times more potent than morphine, 100 times more than fentanyl. The Edmonton Police won’t return stolen cars they recover until they’ve scrubbed them thoroughly, because even trace amounts of these drugs are too dangerous. “We’re finding clients who use methamphetamines and swear up and down they’re not taking opioids,” Mosaico said. “And then we do urine tests and it’s there. We think their dealers are lacing methamphetamine with fentanyl because it increases the addiction.”

The other big thing on his mind, Mosaico said, is that any program to guide users into recovery will bump up against the fact that different people have often lived starkly different lives.


93% 4+

“I don’t know if you’re familiar with Adverse Childhood Experiences — the ACEs study,” Mosaico said. I was, barely, but I needed a refresher.

The original study began in 1985 in San Diego, under Vincent Felitti, who ran an obesity clinic, and Rob Anda from the Centres for Disease Control. (If you want to learn more about the study, this article and this speech on Youtube are good places to start.)

“They surveyed 17,000 people,” Mosaico said. “They found, you know, if people had developmental trauma — so, trauma between the ages of 0 and 18 — and there are 10 different forms of trauma that the study bore out as being detrimental. Things like physical, emotional, sexual abuse; physical, emotional neglect; substance use in the family; untreated mental illness in the family; separation from biological parents; maternal figure being treated violently; and a household member going to jail.

“If those things occurred, you would just tally up the number of types of trauma and you’d get a score out of 10. What they found was, if you scored four or greater, that there seem to be adverse health effects in adulthood. And it wasn’t just the presence of addictions or mental illness. It was lung disease, heart disease, liver disease, certain forms of cancer, diabetes, obesity.” This is almost folk wisdom today, but at the time, Felitti and Anda were amazed at the strength of the correlations between childhood trauma and adult physical and mental health.

The original test has been widely replicated, and it usually finds that the proportion of people in a sample who’ve had four or more adverse childhood experiences is about 12%. So something like every eighth person you meet had a really difficult childhood, and while you can’t predict for individuals from statistical trends, there’s a good chance they’re still living with the fallout.

The team at Radius surveyed a large sample of the population under their care. The prevalence of high-risk ACE scores was about 93 percent, compared to 12 in the general population,” Mosaico said.

“Harvard has a center on the developing child, which has pulled together a lot of the science that explains the neurobiological link between the adverse trauma and the adverse health effects. They talk about limitations in the development of executive function, of decision-making, emotional regulation. Impulse control is underdeveloped, neuroanatomically in the brain. And instead what over-develops is the fight-or-flight response.

“So you’re dealing with a population that, because of their experiences, isn’t the same as the general population . And then that’s compounded by the fact that a high percentage of those clients who have high ACE scores also have traumatic brain injuries from living rough on the street. They also have adult trauma that compounds the childhood trauma. They have [fetal alcohol spectrum disorder], which impairs executive function even further.

“I hear these success stories and I think they’re wonderful, when you hear about people who have a difficult life and then they straighten up. And then, you know, they go back to their jobs and their families and they become leaders in their communities. But this is a population which is over-represented in every aspect of society, negatively as it were. In the prisons and child family welfare services. In the health system, you know, prevalence of HIV, tuberculosis, Hepatitis C, STIs, all that.

“And you look at them and you think, even if they managed to wait, you know, six months to get into an addiction recovery bed, after waiting for weeks to get into detox and they go through the program, what do they go back to? Most of them had to drop out of school. They have criminal records, which makes it hard to get a job. They’re disconnected and estranged from their families. They haven’t learned social skills.

“I had a client who lived in dumpsters for two and a half years. The fact that he just stayed housed — on income support — for the rest of his life was a huge win, right? It was important for his dignity, his quality of life. It’s just a matter of adjusting your expectations of what might actually be realistic.”

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Dr. Larson writes

The idea for these stories goes back to February, when it first became clear to me that 2023 would be Alberta’s worst year for overdose fatalities. I asked the communications team at the University of Calgary for names of people to talk to. Many weeks went by, because sometimes it’s ridiculous how hard it is to extract myself from Ottawa routine. After I published the second article in this series, the one where Marshall Smith showed me all the stuff Alberta is building, I received an email from Dr. Bonnie R. Larson, who’s on faculty at the University of Calgary. She thought I should have talked to her, and she thought I was too credulous in reporting the Alberta government’s side. I asked if I could publish part of her email. Here it is.

What cannot be taken for granted is Mr. Smith’s view that his goals are different, somehow nobler, than those of us on the front line.  Smith paints a picture that front line providers’ priorities are at odds with his own.  His perspective is at once undemocratic, insulting, and arrogant, belittling those who are doing the hard work of keeping people alive every day.  

I will not have Smith speak for me in his suggestion that front liners lack system knowledge and that is why we support harm reduction. This ignores the excellent evidence supporting harm reduction interventions at the population level.  Smith seems to think he knows from whence I “enter this conversation”.  If so, why does he not engage me and my expert colleagues?  Where I “enter this conversation” is at 20 years of working with the affected community and 13 years of post-secondary education.  The only reason I am what Smith likes to dismiss as a “radical harm reduction activist”, is because the UCP, immediately upon taking office, set out to destroy harm reduction in Alberta.  Nobody would have ever needed to fight this soul-destroying battle in the first place if Smith hadn’t put Alberta squarely on its current path of destruction. Yes, we should hope for a better tomorrow but that doesn’t excuse ignoring the past and present.  

I would ask you to think about several additional factors that your analysis appears to ignore, including who actually benefits, in power and wealth, from Smiths’ system of so-called care?  DId you consider the other ways that the UCP policy direction is moving the entire publicly-funded system steadily towards profit?  Gunn (McCullough Centre) was a wonderful non-profit facility that helped many of my patients find their way to recovery from substance use disorders. While I agree that people should not have to pay for treatment, the question remains:  in whose pockets do those tax dollars ultimately land?

You report that Smith indicates that they are “monitoring” the entire system.  Where is the data from that monitoring?  They have had five years now to show some outcomes, but who am I, just a lowly street doctor, to ask for population data?  What I do know is that if deaths begin to decline, it is because so many are already gone.  You should ask to see the data about which Smith so proudly boasts.    

Smith’s entire premise that he is fixing the ‘addiction crisis’ is a fallacy.  Addictions are not increasing.  Deaths by drug poisonings are, however, and Smith’s circus is only making that worse.  Allow me to spell it out for you:  harm reduction addresses the drug poisoning crisis that is, no question, taking a horrific toll in Alberta and nationally.  Smith’s ROSC, in contrast, addresses a figmentary addictions crisis.    

One last tip. Medications used for opioid agonist treatment are not harm reduction, they are treatment.  Nobody here is against treatment or recovery.  But Marshall Smith is against harm reduction.  Why can’t we just have the full spectrum of care???  Polarization is created by politicians to benefit politicians.   

I don’t endorse everything Dr. Larson writes here. The data, or a lot of it, seems to me to be publicly available on the province’s impressive dashboard website. Use the tabs at the top of the page to navigate. And indeed, the story the dashboard tells is alarming, which, as I explained in this series’ first instalment, is why I flew west. But Larson’s years of front-line work has earned her, at the very least, a right of rebuttal.


Synthesis

On my last day in Edmonton, I met Monty Ghosh at Highlevel Diner, at the outer edge of the hip Strathcona neighbourhood on the south of the North Saskatchewan River. Highlevel is famous for its cinnamon buns, which, if I’m going to be honest, are noteworthy mostly for being large.

If the Alberta government and its most vociferous critics are thesis and antithesis, Ghosh tries to provide synthesis. He helped design the National Overdose Response Service, or NORS, which provides some of the emergency-response capability supervised consumption sites offer to people who aren’t near such a site or can’t use it for other reasons. He’s been critical of the Alberta government, but both sides keep lines of communication open.

I asked him about diverted safe supply — the idea that pharmaceutical opioids used in safe-supply programs in BC, principally hydromorphone tablets, are being sold or distributed away from their intended use. “I know it happens,” Ghosh said. “We sometimes get clients from British Columbia who come to Alberta to try to escape BC, because they’re looking for a fresh start. They’re looking for support and they’ll tell me themselves that they’ve diverted their safe supply.”

But what are the quantities? Trivial so far, Ghosh maintains. “Have I seen hydromorphone come into our province? Not at all, not yet.” This is the same thing I heard from Warren Driechel, the Edmonton deputy police chief.

Why do people divert their prescribed safe supply anyway? The answer Ghosh gave me was the answer I heard from everyone I asked. “They never used it. It just was not effective. The potency of the hydromorphone that they’re getting was nowhere near touching the fentanyl that they were using. It wasn’t dealing with the cravings, it wasn’t dealing with withdrawals, they felt it was useless. So what did they do? They sold it. They’re incredibly poor, they cannot afford their substance-use concerns and so therefore they supplement with revenue from hydromorphone.”

Before I flew to Edmonton, when Ghosh and I were trying to gauge on the phone what each of us thought of this infernal crisis, he figured out that I was interested in the differences between government policy in British Columbia and Alberta. “I’m not sure you want to hear this,” he said, “but I think it’s going to be bad everywhere.” I said that’s what I think too. Perhaps I surprised him.

I don’t know what happens next. Maybe things just stop getting worse everywhere on their own, for big complex reasons that resist easy analysis. Overdose deaths were lower last year in the United States, the capital of this hellscape, than the year before.

If not… well, we shall see. I wonder what happens in year six or seven of the effort the Alberta government is building. Is there resentment among people in ordinary hospitals and correctional facilities, who don’t have access to bespoke programs and personal attention? Does the ROSC system become bureaucratized after the first generation of administrators moves on?

Or does it start to win converts? David Eby, the NDP premier of British Columbia, has started putting distance between himself and his public-health advisors on legalization and safe supply. A new appointment in BC is being closely watched in Edmonton.

Or, conversely, does the Alberta recovery effort bump up against the limits imposed by the substances involved and by human nature? Reported recovery rates from addiction vary widely, depending in part on how you measure them. This paper puts the rate at less than 30%. If you even manage to double it, that still leaves a large cohort who aren’t getting better. Would their neighbours see them as people who “failed recovery” or “blew their chance?”

I won’t claim to know. I do hope that in the year ahead, more Canadians check their assumptions and stow their cheap certainties. Especially those who aspire to positions of leadership.

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Addictions

Why North America’s Drug Decriminalization Experiments Failed

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A 2022 Los Angeles Times piece advocates following Vancouver’s model of drug liberalization and treatment. Adam Zivo argues British Columbia’s model has been proven a failure.

By Adam Zivo

Oregon and British Columbia neglected to coerce addicts into treatment.

Ever since Portugal enacted drug decriminalization in 2001, reformers have argued that North America should follow suit. The Portuguese saw precipitous declines in overdoses and blood-borne infections, they argued, so why not adopt their approach?

But when Oregon and British Columbia decriminalized drugs in the early 2020s, the results were so catastrophic that both jurisdictions quickly reversed course. Why? The reason is simple: American and Canadian policymakers failed to grasp what led to the Portuguese model’s initial success.

Contrary to popular belief, Portugal does not allow consequence-free drug use. While the country treats the possession of illicit drugs for personal use as an administrative offense, it nonetheless summons apprehended drug users to “dissuasion” commissions composed of doctors, social workers, and lawyers. These commissions assess a drug user’s health, consumption habits, and socioeconomic circumstances before using arbitrator-like powers to impose appropriate sanctions.

These sanctions depend on the nature of the offense. In less severe cases, users receive warnings, small fines, or compulsory drug education. Severe or repeat offenders, however, can be banned from visiting certain places or people, or even have their property confiscated. Offenders who fail to comply are subject to wage garnishment.

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Throughout the process, users are strongly encouraged to seek voluntary drug treatment, with most penalties waived if they accept. In the first few years after decriminalization, Portugal made significant investments into its national addiction and mental-health infrastructure (e.g., methadone clinics) to ensure that it had sufficient capacity to absorb these patients.

This form of decriminalization is far less radical than its North American proponents assume. In effect, Portugal created an alternative justice system that coercively diverts addicts into rehab instead of jail. That users are not criminally charged does not mean they are not held accountable. Further, the country still criminalizes the public consumption and trafficking of illicit drugs.

At first, Portugal’s decriminalization experiment was a clear success. During the 2000s, drug-related HIV infections halved, non-criminal drug seizures surged 500 percent, and the number of addicts in treatment rose by two-thirds. While the data are conflicting on whether overall drug use increased or decreased, it is widely accepted that decriminalization did not, at first, lead to a tidal wave of new addiction cases.

Then things changed. The 2008 global financial crisis destabilized the Portuguese economy and prompted austerity measures that slashed public drug-treatment capacity. Wait times for state-funded rehab ballooned, sometimes reaching a year. Police stopped citing addicts for possession, or even public consumption, believing that the country’s dissuasion commissions had grown dysfunctional. Worse, to cut costs, the government outsourced many of its addiction services to ideological nonprofits that prioritized “harm reduction” services (e.g., distributing clean crack pipes, operating “safe consumption” sites) over nudging users into rehab. These factors gradually transformed the Portuguese system from one focused on recovery to one that enables and normalizes addiction.

This shift accelerated after the Covid-19 pandemic. As crime and public disorder rose, more discarded drug paraphernalia littered the streets. The national overdose rate reached a 12-year high in 2023, and that year, the police chief of the country’s second-largest city told the Washington Post that, anecdotally, the drug problem seemed comparable to what it was before decriminalization. Amid the chaos, some community leaders demanded reform, sparking a debate that continues today.

In North America, however, progressive policymakers seem entirely unaware of these developments and the role that treatment and coercion played in Portugal’s initial success.

In late 2020, Oregon embarked on its own drug decriminalization experiment, known as Measure 110. Though proponents cited Portugal’s success, unlike the European nation, Oregon failed to establish any substantive coercive mechanisms to divert addicts into treatment. The state merely gave drug users a choice between paying a $100 ticket or calling a health hotline. Because the state imposed no penalty for failing to follow through with either option, drug possession effectively became a consequence-free behavior. Police data from 2022, for example, found that 81 percent of ticketed individuals simply ignored their fines.

Additionally, the state failed to invest in treatment capacity and actually defunded existing drug-use-prevention programs to finance Measure 110’s unused support systems, such as the health hotline.

The results were disastrous. Overdose deaths spiked almost 50 percent between 2021 and 2023. Crime and public drug use became so rampant in Portland that state leaders declared a 90-day fentanyl emergency in early 2024. Facing withering public backlash, Oregon ended its decriminalization experiment in the spring of 2024 after almost four years of failure.

The same story played out in British Columbia, which launched a three-year decriminalization pilot project in January 2023. British Columbia, like Oregon, declined to establish dissuasion commissions. Instead, because Canadian policymakers assumed that “destigmatizing” treatment would lead more addicts to pursue it, their new system employed no coercive tools. Drug users caught with fewer than 2.5 grams of illicit substances were simply given a card with local health and social service contacts.

This approach, too, proved calamitous. Open drug use and public disorder exploded throughout the province. Parents complained about the proliferation of discarded syringes on their children’s playgrounds. The public was further scandalized by the discovery that addicts were permitted to smoke fentanyl and meth openly in hospitals, including in shared patient rooms. A 2025 study published in JAMA Health Forum, which compared British Columbia with several other Canadian provinces, found that the decriminalization pilot was associated with a spike in opioid hospitalizations.

The province’s progressive government mostly recriminalized drugs in early 2024, cutting the pilot short by two years. Their motivations were seemingly political, with polling data showing burgeoning support for their conservative rivals.

The lessons here are straightforward. Portugal’s decriminalization worked initially because it did not remove consequences for drug users. It imposed a robust system of non-criminal sanctions to control addicts’ behavior and coerce them into well-funded, highly accessible treatment facilities.

Done right, decriminalization should result in the normalization of rehabilitation—not of drug use. Portugal discovered this 20 years ago and then slowly lost the plot. North American policymakers, on the other hand, never understood the story to begin with.

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Why is B.C.’s safer supply program shrinking?

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By Alexandra Keeler

Experts say physicians have lost their ‘zeal’ for prescribing safer supply amid growing concerns about diversion and effectiveness

Participation in B.C.’s safer supply program — which offers prescription opioids to people who use drugs — has dropped by nearly 25 per cent over the past two years, according to recent government data.

The B.C. Ministry of Health says updated prescribing guidelines and tighter program oversight are behind the decline.

But addiction experts say the story is more complicated.

“Many of my addiction medicine colleagues have stopped prescribing ‘safe supply’ hydromorphone to their patients because of the high rates of diversion … and lack of efficacy in stabilizing the substance use disorder (sometimes worsening it),” said Dr. Launette Rieb, a clinical associate professor at the University of British Columbia and addiction medicine specialist.

“Many doctors who initially supported ‘safe supply’ no longer provide it but do not wish to talk about it publicly for fear of reprisals,” she said in her email.

Missing data

B.C. has had safer supply programs in place province-wide since 2021.

Participation in its program peaked at nearly 5,200 individuals in March 2023, and then declined to fewer than 3,900 individuals by December 2024. This is the most recent data publicly available, according to B.C.’s health ministry.

In an emailed statement, the ministry attributed the decline to updated clinical guidance and more restrictive prescribing practices “aimed at strengthening the integrity and safety of the program.”

In February, the province updated its safer supply prescribing guidelines to require most patients of the program to consume prescription opioids under the supervision of health-care professionals — a practice known as “witnessed dosing.”

The B.C. government has not released any data on how many patients have been transitioned to witnessed dosing.

The ministry did not address Canadian Affairs’ questions about whether patients are being cut off involuntarily from the program, whether fewer physicians are prescribing or whether barriers to accessing safer supply have increased.

‘Dependence, tolerance, addiction’

Some experts say the decline in safer supply participation is due to physicians being influenced by their peers and public controversy over the program.

Dr. Karen Urbanoski, an associate professor in the Public Health and Social Policy department at the University of Victoria, says peer influence plays a significant role in prescribing practices.

A 2024 study found the uptake of prescribed safer supply in B.C. was closely tied to prescribers’ professional networks.

“These peer influences are apparent for both the uptake of [safer supply] prescribing and its discontinuation — they are likely playing a role here,” Urbanoski said in an email to Canadian Affairs.

Urbanoski also points to the broader environment — including negative media coverage and uncertainty about program funding — as factors behind the decline.

“Media discourse and general politicization of [safer supply] has likely had a ‘cooling effect’ on prescribing,” she said.

Dr. Leonara Regenstreif, a primary care physician and founding member of Addiction Medicine Canada, says many physicians embraced safer supply without fully grasping its clinical risks. Addiction Medicine Canada is an advocacy group representing 23 addiction specialists across Canada.

Regenstreif says physicians too young to have practiced during the peak of OxyContin prescribing were often enthusiastic prescribers of safer supply in the program’s early days. OxyContin is a prescription opioid that helped spark North America’s addiction crisis.

“In my experience, the MD colleagues who have embraced [safer supply] prescribing most zealously … never experienced the trap of writing scripts without knowing what was ahead — dependence, tolerance, addiction, consequences,” her emailed statement says.

Now, many of these physicians are looking for an “exit ramp,” Regenstreif says, as concerns over safer supply diversion and its treatment benefits grow.

Reib, of the UBC, says some of her colleagues in addictions medicine fear speaking out about their concerns with the program.

“Some of my colleagues have had their lives threatened by their patients who have become financially dependent on selling their [hydromorphone],” said Rieb.

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of B.C., which represents physicians in the province, referred Canadian Affairs’ questions about declining program participation to the health ministry and the BC Centre on Substance Use. The centre was unable to provide comment by press time.

Public backlash

The decline in B.C.’s safer supply participation unfolds amid mounting scrutiny of the program and its effectiveness.

Rieb says that the program’s framing — as free, safe and widely available — may run counter to longstanding public health strategies aimed at reducing drug use through pricing and harm awareness.

“Drivers of public use of substances are availability, cost, and perception of harm,” she said. “[Safe supply] is being promoted as safe, free and available for the asking.”

There have been reports of youth gaining access to diverted safer supply opioids and developing addictions to fentanyl as a result. Last September, B.C. father Gregory Sword testified before the House of Commons that his teenage daughter died after accessing diverted safer supply opioids.

B.C.’s recent decision to overhaul its prescribing guidelines followed revelations of a widespread scam by dozens of B.C. pharmacists to exploit the safer supply program to maximize profits.

Experts also note that Canada still lacks the evidence needed to assess the long-term health outcomes of people in safer supply programs. There is currently no research in Canada tracking these long-term health outcomes.

“There is a lack of research to date on retention on [safer supply],” said Urbanoksi.

Rieb agrees. “There are many methodological problems with the recent studies that conclude [the] benefit of pharmaceutical alternatives (‘safe supply’),” she said.

“We need long term studies that look at risks/harms as well as potential benefits.”

Regenstreif says the recent drop in participation may have an unintended upside — encouraging more people with substance use disorders to try what she sees as a more effective treatment: opioid agonist therapy, or OAT. This therapy uses medications like methadone or buprenorphine to reduce withdrawal symptoms and cravings.

“If fewer people are accessing [safer supply] tablets … more people with [opioid use disorder] might accept proper OAT treatment,” she said.


This article was produced through the Breaking Needles Fellowship Program, which provided a grant to Canadian Affairs, a digital media outlet, to fund journalism exploring addiction and crime in Canada. Articles produced through the Fellowship are co-published by Break The Needle and Canadian Affairs.


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