The latest news articles featuring BC Centre on Substance Use.
Adding up the billions of government dollars directed at Canada’s opioid crisis
May 30, 2023 | Vancouver Is Awesome
Since the province declared opioid overdoses and deaths a public health emergency seven years ago, at least 11,807 people in the province have died. Since Canada announced a new drugs and substances strategy focused on harm reduction, roughly 34,455 Canadians have lost their lives to an opioid overd...
Machine-Based Opioid Dispensing Reduced Drug-Related Harms
May 30, 2023 | Medscape
A British Columbia program that uses biometric dispensing machines to supply pharmaceutical-grade opioids to patients with opioid use disorder reduced drug-related harms and could potentially overcome barriers that hamper other safer supply strategies, an analysis has found. Characteristics that enc...
Diversion of ‘safer supply’: A growing problem or urban myth?
May 28, 2023 | Vancouver Sun
“A nightmare every day” is how Greg Sword describes the agony of losing his 14-year-old daughter Kamilah to a drug overdose last August. “She took a pill in the middle of the night and never woke up.” The B.C. Coroners Service told the grieving father that Kamilah had three drugs in her syst...
Methamphetamine use is on the rise, worsening Canada’s already complex opioid crisis
May 23, 2023 | Globe and Mail
Like others working on the front lines of Canada’s toxic drug crisis, Paxton Bach is seeing a troubling shift in patterns of illicit drug use. Over the past decade, Dr. Bach, an internal medicine and addiction medicine specialist at St. Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver and co-medical director at t...
Deadly April inflames drug debate. Does B.C. need more safe supply, or less?
May 18, 2023 | Global News
At least 206 people died of toxic drugs in April, according to the latest data from the BC Coroners Service, adding fuel to the debate over how to handle the province’s deadly drug crisis. The latest numbers show at least 814 drug deaths in the first four months of the year, with fentanyl de...
