I remember certain moments while I was picking garbage in Vanier last year for my part-time job. Sure, the sexual profanities stand out, and the overall aggression and occasional violence was nothing if not memorable. However, one image is permanently burned in my mind: that of a ripped, full-sized garbage bag, filled to the brim with used hypodermic needles.
If the opioid crisis needed a poster, that image was about as perfect as one could get.
But, such scenes are not uncommon, and the Canadian government seems to be aware of this. The opioid crisis has killed thousands of Canadians—yet the federal government still has a conflicting set of policies and attitudes towards it.
These attitudes are reflected in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s insistence that being addicted to opioids is a medical and not a criminal issue—while simultaneously refusing to get rid of laws that criminalize opioid addiction by handing out harsh punishments for the illegal possession of opioids.
Furthermore, the College of Family Physicians of Canada (CFPC) has set new opioid-prescribing guidelines to aid medical professionals in deciding what is best for their patients—even though we now know that the vast majority of deaths are not from prescription opioids, but come from illegally obtained drugs.
This is not the worst part of the new prescription guidelines, however. The dumb, and dangerous, part of the guideline is the radical reduction of recommended opioid consumption for those suffering from intense chronic pain. While the previous guidelines allowed for up to 200 mg of opioids like morphine, the new one only allows up to 90 mg. This of course, will lead to massive withdrawals for any patient on the previous dose who has a doctor insane enough to follow it—and there are quite a few.
A friend of mine who suffers from intense chronic pain, and who takes more morphine than even the previously required dose recommended in order to make living tolerable, has been told that she will have her prescription removed once her current doctor retires, as nobody else in the area is willing to prescribe that much medication.
Does it really make sense that we should make people such as this who suffer from chronic pain go through hellish withdrawals, and then live a life in unbearable pain—assuming they don’t start getting opioids off the street, which are often laced with other illicit and deadly drugs—just so we could get rid of the relatively small percentage of people who abuse prescription opioids?
Nevertheless, Trudeau’s contradictions are overshadowed when compared to Premier Doug Ford’s utter simple-mindedness concerning the opioid crisis. Doug Ford’s mentality regarding the crisis seems to be one of “opioids = bad.” Thus, Ford has refused to endorse safe injection sites, which have been shown to save lives by reversing overdoses and reducing the risk of spreading bloodborne diseases. In fact, a safe injection site in Toronto reversed 213 overdoses in only a year.
Should we really refrain from implementing life saving systems simply because it offends the sensibilities of supposed family guy Doug Ford, especially while we simultaneously drop the prescriptions of those suffering from chronic pain and forcing them to buy from illegal vendors?
Every level of the Canadian government needs to work together in order to combat the opioid crisis, while simultaneously making sure that patients get the medication that they need.
This means getting rid of ridiculous efforts to take patients requiring opioids off of drugs like morphine, and listening to the 850 doctors urging the Ford government to establish safe injection sites to save Canadian lives through safe injection sites.
