As Overdoses Surge, a Canadian Province Is Giving Out Drugs

VANCOUVER—The Canadian province of British Columbia is responding to a surge in overdose fatalities with a novel method: It is giving out opioids.

The province’s controversial policy goes additional than the methadone therapy systems that are frequent in the U.S. and Canada. Medical doctors in the province will now be capable to prescribe stronger medicine like hydromorphone, an opioid that is five times much more impressive than morphine Dexedrine, a stimulant for cocaine and methamphetamine end users and tablets of fentanyl, a powerful synthetic opioid.

Well being officials and advocates say medicine acquired from pharmacies and clinics are safer alternatives to road medicine, which significantly are laced with deadly quantities of opioids and tranquilizers.

The program is the hottest endeavor by wellbeing authorities in British Columbia to get a devastating overdose epidemic below regulate. It also marks the hottest flare-up in a prolonged-simmering discussion over irrespective of whether giving end users entry to so-called safer medicine aids or harms them.

Just about one hundred,000 persons in Canada and the U.S. died from overdoses very last calendar year, as the consequences of the Covid-19 pandemic amplified the lethal effect of a poisonous drug provide.