The NDP Opposition claims Ms. Smith’s government concealed the latest data until after the election. Ms. Smith’s office is denying this. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that people in the province are dying in record numbers, largely because of a toxic drug supply.
Any notion of the “Alberta model” being some kind of panacea for drug addiction should be dispensed of immediately. Yes, treatment and recovery are important aspects of an overall approach to the opioid epidemic, but so is safer supply, something the UCP has wrong-headedly rejected. In fact, supervised consumption sitesPeople are dying because of the deadly toxins in the drugs they are purchasing on the street, primarily fentanyl.
Ben Perrin, a law professor at the University of B.C. who specializes in drug policy, believes safer supply is a vital tool in the fight against this menace. Right now, however, not enough people are able to access it. “Prescribed safer supply only reaches around 5 per cent of the estimated 100,000 people in B.C. with opioid-use disorder,” Mr. Perrin told me in an e-mail. “At present, we do not have these harm reduction initiatives or on-demand evidence-based treatment in B.C. – or anywhere in Canada – scaled up adequately to sustain a significant reduction in unregulated drug deaths.”
That’s from someone who has been invested in studying this issue for years and who has authored an extremely important book on the issue –. Maybe he might know a little more about this subject than an Alberta Premier who hosted a radio show on which she promoted some incredibly irresponsible and potentially dangerousCanada’s drug crisis is the country’s problem to solve.