Amid Deadly Opioid Crisis, Canada Eases Rules on Opening New Supervised Injection Sites

Amid an opioid epidemic in Canada more deadly than both the 1980s AIDs crisis and the 1918 Spanish influenza pandemic, the government this week relaxed rules around supervised drug injection sites — long proven to prevent infections and overdoses, saving thousands of lives.

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The Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau first announced back in December 2016 plans to put forward Bill C-37, which amends the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, Conservative-era legislation that sought to criminalize people with substance abuse issues. Health Minister Jane Philpott said the changes aim to swing drug policies from the realm of criminal justice to public health.

Philpott announced Thursday that the new law, approved by the Senate Wednesday, removes 26 strict requirements for new supervised injection sites. Under the previous law, new injection sites had to prove medical and scientific evidence of benefit, needing to drum up a number of letters of support from provincial health ministers, local police and regional health officials. The restrictive measures were part and parcel of the Conservatives’ tough-on-crime approach under former Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

“The evidence on supervised consumption sites is absolutely clear,” Philpott said outside the House of Commons, reported The Toronto Star.

“In communities where they have been well-established and maintained, including of course InSite in Vancouver ... it has been shown to, of course, save lives and reduce infections but it has shown to have no negative impacts on crime rates in the community,” she added.

In 2003, the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, opened the first supervised injection site in North America, called InSite, in order to tackle an epidemic of HIV and hepatitis C in the city’s Downtown Eastside neighborhood, often reduced to “the poorest zip code in Canada.”

By 2015, InSite had received more than 3 million visits and had safely treated nearly 5,000 overdoses — without a single death.

But as the site clashed with the then-federal Conservative government’s policies and outlook, the CDSA law was introduced — described by one health authority as “unduly onerous” — and has since prevented many potential new sites from opening.

With its precedent-setting example, groups in Seattle, San Francisco, New York City and beyond are weighing the possibility of opening similar facilities.

Currently, Canada, with the province of British Columbia in particular, is experiencing an opioid crisis of “unprecedented proportions,” Philpott emphasized.

"We know that at minimum in Canada, there were 2,300 Canadians that died last year of an opioid overdose,” Philpott told a conference in Montreal this week. “The death toll is worse than any other infectious epidemic in Canada, including the peak of AIDS deaths, since the Spanish flu that took the lives of 50,000 people a century ago.”

Many of these overdoses have involved fentanyl — a drug that is 50 times stronger than heroin.

On Friday, the Canadian Nurses Association stated that the new law was a good start. “We do think it’s a definite significant improvement over the previous government’s legislation,” said Barb Shellian, the organization’s president, The Guardian reported.