\u201cWe certainly saw overdoses presenting to first responders and emergency departments surging at astronomical levels at St. Paul\u2019s Hospital in Vancouver.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
Dr. Ahamad says that with the increasingly toxic and poisonous\u00a0illicit drug market and a lack of accessible treatment across Canada, \u201cyou\u2019re going to see skyrocketing overdoes and overdose deaths.\u201d<\/p>\n
To \u00a0help address the crisis, Dr. Ahamd tells Tremonti that harm reduction\u00a0needs more support.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t think that we\u2019ve really even come close to investing enough for harm reduction. At the same time we need to significantly increase the funding and expanding of the treatment system in Canada as well.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
![\"Fentanyl](\"https:\/\/i.cbc.ca\/1.3869146.1480128134!\/fileImage\/httpImage\/image.jpg_gen\/derivatives\/original_620\/fentanyl-overdose-crisis-2.jpg\")
<\/p>\n
British Columbia saw 128 fatal overdoses in November alone. (Chris Corday\/CBC)<\/p>\n
Recently, the federal government announced it would make it easier for cities to open safe consumption sites.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
UBC adjunct professor Mark Haden <\/strong>says it\u2019s a small step in the right direction but \u201cfundamentally it\u2019s not thinking about it in the right way.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Haden points to drug prohibition as the main problem.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cWhen alcohol was prohibited, what we had is widely available strong, concentrated, often toxic alcohol on our streets,\u201d Haden\u00a0says.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n \u201cAnd only when we ended that process did the death toll stopped from alcohol.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n He tells Tremonti that illegal markets will always produce more concentrated products and proposes that in a context of a health service provision, people could come and receive heroin and be cared for.<\/p>\n \u201cIf we started providing clean pure heroin then we wouldn\u2019t have the same problem that we\u2019re seeing today.\u201d<\/p>\n Listen to the full segment at the top of this web post.<\/strong><\/p>\n This segment was produced by The Current\u2019s Idella Sturino and WIllow Smith.<\/em><\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Read story transcript According to new numbers released by the B.C. Coroners Service, November was the deadliest month on record for the province with 128 fatal overdoses \u2014 bringing the year\u2019s total to more than 750 deaths.\u00a0 The spike is being blamed on the synthetic opioid fentanyl, detected in more than 60 per cent of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-60141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=60141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/60141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=60141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=60141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/healthmedicinet.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=60141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}