{O/C} Vancouver authorities are scrambling to stifle drug overdoses via a heroin injection programme.
This as Canada languishes in a drug overdose epidemic.
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[Notes: Courtesy of CBC News]
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Reporter (September 1st, 2016):
Just last week, 16-year-old Gwynevere Staddon died of an overdose in a Starbucks.
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Reporter (September 17th, 2020):
On the middle of a sidewalk on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a man is unconscious and struggling to breath.
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Rampant drug overdoses on Canada's streets formed the impetus for clamping down on drugs.
But what about a legal fentanyl dispensary, not social media pages where teens get their drugs?
With some 2,200 people dying of overdoses in Vancouver last year, authorities are stepping up to the harm reduction plate, an approach to reducing deaths and grave illness from illicit drugs by making the drugs safer.
The supply of fentanyl is becoming so lethal, it's the culprit behind the country's overdose conundrum.
This rangy 30-year-old here started using pills recreationally in his adolescent years, but then switched to heroin.
Harm reduction has long remained a contentious issue in its neighbour, the United States, with only fitful support.
The experiments are funded by the public health system, which believes they will hopefully ameliorate the economic burden on taxpayers given reduced emergency services and hospitalisations.
Plus providing injectable heroin to patients who are not responsive to other forms of treatment helped them curb their use when compared to methadone's effect.
But experts are trying to strangle the nascent programme at birth.
They say the experiments are heading into uncharted waters, diverting resources from proven treatments to new experiments.
In the end, if the programme is to have a new lease on life, it'll still be worthwhile expanding to slough off drug overdoses from British Columbia's streets.
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