A Director of the BC Centre for Substance Abuse says Safe Injection Sites in places like Prince George could be one way to curb the number of overdose deaths.
The province’s opioid crisis has claimed over 4,000Â lives since 2015 and 29 of those deaths took place in Prince George this year already surpassing the city’s 2017 total of 22.
Within Northern Health, 58 fatal overdoses have been recorded so far across the region.
Dr. Evan Wood says if safe injection sites were to come to the northern capital, the volume of overdose deaths would eventually go down.
“Health care can be provided in the form of addiction treatment and other services for people because you have that contact with them and supervising injecting facilities and really the experience in other settings has been successful, not only will this reduce discarded needles it also reduces overdoses.”
“We can have a scenario where health care can be provided in the form of addiction treatment and other services for people because you have that contact with them and the supervised injecting facilities and that’s really the experience in other settings where this not only discards public needles but it reduces overdoses and it actually can have a scenario where we can match people with addiction treatment.”
However, Wood adds there may only be one drawback on the topic of clean needles.
“We know that giving people clean needles is really important and it saves a lot of health care dollars, the problem is when you give someone a needle they might go behind a building or in a park and inject there and would be a very high risk if they are using alone to have a fatal overdose if there is no one around.”
He also believes it’s about time we treat illicit drug overdoses the same way as other medical emergencies at local hospitals and doctors offices.
“If an individual shows up at the emergency department, the family doctor or to a health authority clinic it’s similar to the treatment of other similar diseases and I often use the example if someone is having a heart attack they show up at the emergency room and everybody knows what to do, we aren’t there yet with illicit drugs.”
Wood says the safe injection sites have been a huge success all across Europe, especially in Switzerland and has no doubts the sites could work here as well.
Making effective treatments available, public programming like take-home Naloxone are critical to turning the situation around.