Health Canada is loosening regulation of naloxone—a drug used to prevent opioid overdoses—which is now the leading cause of death among youth in Ontario.
As of March 22, naloxone will be available over the counter without a prescription in a liquid form, administered via injection.
Student Advocates for Public Health, a group based out of the University of Alberta, campaigned the federal government to allow Canadians to obtain naloxone without a prescription.
In 2014, more than 270 people in that province died of fentanyl abuse, which opioid experts say is 50 times stronger than heroin. The advocacy group described fentanyl use in Alberta as an “epidemic.”
Naloxone has often been called an “overdose antidote” because it can be used to treat opioid overdoses in emergency situations.
“It’s a very, very safe drug,” said David Juurlink, head of the division of Clinical Pharmacology and Toxicology at the Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto. “It is increasingly important to have this now because of how widespread its benefits are. It’s not just fentanyl it reverses—it reverses heroin and oxycodone and all of the other opiates we have.”
A 2014 study from the Institute for Clinical Evaluative Sciences and St. Michael’s Hospital found one in every eight deaths of Ontarians aged 25 to 34 was related to opioid use in 2010.
The study also found evidence of a high amount of recreational opioid use by high school and university students. This may be a result of a misconception that certain opioids are safer than other drugs because they are often prescribed.
“Opiates have overtaken road traffic accidents in claiming the young and the vulnerable in our population,” said Kieran Moore, a Queen’s University professor who has studied the effects of opioid use. “If you think about the multi-million dollar infrastructure we’ve put into saving lives from car accidents, we haven’t put a hundredth of that investment into saving lives from illicit drugs like opiates.”
Opioid usage has skyrocketed in Canada in the last 10 years. The 2014 study had found the rates in which high-dose opioid use was dispensed increased from 781 units per 1,000 people in 2006 to 961 units per 1,000 people in 2011.
Fentanyl was developed as a prescription painkiller, but gained popularity as a street drug after OxyContin was removed from the market in 2012. Experts have said fentanyl is more powerful than OxyContin and morphine.
The Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA) estimates 1,019 of the Canadians who died of drug overdoses between 2009 and 2014 had fentanyl in their system.
“We’ve seen throughout the mid 2000s up to 2010 an increasing amount of dependency on prescription opioids,” said Matthew Young, senior research and policy analyst at CCSA.
“Many of the harms are associated with people not knowing what they’re taking,” he said. “The whole issue with fentanyl use is that people are not necessarily seeking fentanyl. It is being used as an agent that is being put into drugs that are being sold as either oxytocin or heroin.”
Moore said Health Canada took so long for naloxone regulations to be relaxed because of the stigma and stereotype surrounding the issue.
“The voice of the young and vulnerable in our population is rarely heard. It has been 15 years of this opiate epidemic, and we’re finally getting a small amount of action on the policy side to reduce deaths. It’s a long time coming,” Moore said.
