VANCOUVER — Peer-reviewed research is emerging about the possible impacts of British Columbia's safer supply program, which provides prescription alternatives to toxic illicit drugs, with two studies in international medical journals casting the strategy in a different light.
Shawn Bugden is an author of one of the studies, which found an almost 63 per cent"relative increase" in the opioid overdose hospitalization rate across B.C. after the introduction of safer supply. It was published in JAMA Internal Medicine in January. "Is it possible that putting more opioids into the system is not necessarily the solution, even though a common-sense approach to suggest a safer supply of drugs would be helpful? I don't think we really know those answers," he said.
"But I think it's very difficult to convincingly link that to the prescribed safer-supply policy," said Bach,an addiction medicine physician at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver and co-medical director of the B.C. Centre on Substance Use. "We really want to see whether, in the long term, this is resulting in deaths at the individual level. And if that works well enough, then we should see it at the population level, eventually, as well," he said.
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