Canada’s opioid crisis has hit British Columbia harder than anywhere else. Last year, 1,422 people across the province died after taking drugs accounting for more than a third of all overdose deaths in Canada in 2017. The epidemic has B.C. health officials desperate for new ideas to bring the numbers back under control. And so, last December, the BC Centre for Disease Control said it plans to distribute hydromorphone (brand name Dilaudid) as a clean alternative to street drugs contaminated with fentanyl. Controversial though it might be, the idea is not entirely new. In Vancouver, the nonprofit Portland Hotel Society (PHS) quietly launched the hydromorphone program in September 2016.