The secret housing program giving safe drugs to addicted residents
Vancouver’s Portland Hotel Society has been quietly running an opioid substitution program for more than a year
Vice (Canada)
Monday, February 5, 2018
Monday, February 5, 2018
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.
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