Fentanyl

Ron in Regina

"Voice of the West" Party
Apr 9, 2008
30,487
11,208
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Regina, Saskatchewan
The federal government quietly defunded its safer supply pilot programs earlier this year after media reports, ministerial investigations and police busts showed that patients were reselling a significant portion of their hydromorphone to purchase illicit fentanyl. This fraud evidently flooded communities with diverted opioids, spurring new addictions and enriching organized crime.

The CBC clearly opposed this change and produced a film — ”The political war on safe drugs” — calling for funding to be reinstated. Their thesis was straightforward and nakedly partisan: safer supply is a wonderful, evidence-based policy and Conservative opposition to it is rooted in reactionary politics and scientific ignorance.

The most important thing to know about the documentary is that it excludes any experts who oppose safer supply. Over the past two years, dozens of addiction doctors — many of whom hold prominent leadership positions within the field — published several open letters calling for safer supply to be reformed or abolished, and spoke extensively to the media about why the strategy is disastrous. None of them are in the film. Their advocacy work is completely ignored.
This gaslighting campaign eventually shattered under the weight of contradictory evidence — so now safer supply advocates have pivoted to claiming that they, in fact, had always known that hydromorphone would be widely diverted, as the drug is too weak for fentanyl users, but were simply not listened to.

The Fifth Estate uncritically peddles this revisionist history and, in an Orwellian twist, lionizes the safer supply movement for “warning” policymakers about a problem that it had, in fact, tried to conceal, or dismiss. The harm reduction activists — and their CBC stenographers — conclude that the only solution is to expand safer supply, offer stronger substances and even legalize all hard drugs.

In a particularly shocking scene, one of Canada’s leading safer supply prescribers, Christy Sutherland, recounts how she stopped offering hydromorphone upon realizing that at least 40 per cent of her patients were reselling the drug. After discontinuation, she had to temporarily flee Vancouver because violent patients threatened her life.
 
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