Mark Haden, an adjunct professor at UBC’s school of population and public health, commented on reports that a new opiate that’s up to 100 times stronger than fentanyl is spreading to Vancouver.
Haden agreed that naloxone, a drug that reverses opioid overdoses, should be made more widely available, but says that’s not the real solution.
“The fact we criminalize drugs and do not allow people to access these drugs in a controlled and regulated way — based on a public-health model — results in absolutely uncontrolled drugs on our streets that have unknown purity, unknown strength and unknown concentration,” Haden told the Vancouver Sun.
Similar articles appeared in The Province and Ottawa Citizen.
