Help fentanyl labs make a safer drug

Sep 7, 2017 | 5:00 AM

KAMLOOPS — Illegal fentanyl lab operators don’t intend to kill users. They would prefer to have return customers. The problem, I suspect, is that the fentanyl used is so concentrated that it’s hard to dissolve to a uniform consistency. The resulting doses are uneven –from low to deadly. It’s a good idea to provide testing facilities for fentanyl cooks to let them know the potency of their product. Dr. Tyndall of the BC Centre for Disease Control says:

“I’m still firmly of the belief that nobody’s actually trying to kill people. These manufacturers don’t know what they’re doing and they’re putting out ridiculous concentrations of these drugs.”

The BCCDC recommends an expansion of drug-checking services where anyone, including producers of illegal fentanyal, can have their drugs tested for toxicity. B.C.’s Minister of Health, Judy Darcy, endorses the expansion.

As it stands, drug policy is perverse because we tell users not to use street drugs but provide no other option when legal supplies fail.

“We strongly advise people to stop using street drugs,” says Dr. Tyndall, “and if they can’t do that, then we offer them … Suboxone or methadone, and if that doesn’t work, we basically tell them to go and find their own drugs even though there is a very real possibility of dying.”

The BCCDC suggests ten “areas of action.” If they were adopted, opioids would be essentially legalized much in the way that marijuana will be next year. Grower’s clubs and individuals would be allowed to make medical grade opiates. To clarify, opiates are derived from poppies whereas opioids include all synthetic and natural products.

Legal opioids are not likely to happen any time soon. I started lobbying for legalization of cannabis 40 years ago and look how long that took. Optimistically, with the model of legalized marijuana to be established soon, it won’t take another 40 years for the legalization of opioids.

Even without legalization, off-label uses of opioids are allowed. The BCCDC suggest dispensing take-home opioids such as oral hydromorphone which users could take home, grind up, and inject without supervision.

If the above recommendations only seem radical, it’s only because of a false sense of what criminalization can achieve. Criminal law can’t accomplish societal goals. If we want to stop people from using harmful drugs, criminalization has been a dismal failure. Instead, make drugs legal and educate people of the unhealthy consequences of use. It works with tobacco. If the goal is harm reduction, the recommendations don’t seem so radical.

Imagine that we are talking about baby strollers instead of drugs, and that some early models collapsed resulting in injury or death. An irrational solution would be to make strollers illegal. The sensible solution would be to regulate manufacture of the strollers to make them safe.

Prohibition of opioids isn’t working. It didn’t work for coffee, cigarettes or alcohol.

If the current trend continues, the death rate will continue to climb. More than 1,500 will die in British Columbia this year -ordinary people like friends, family and neighbours. Forget the stereotype of street people overdosing in alleys: 90 per cent of deaths are indoors. Isn’t it time to abandon prohibition and give harm-reduction a chance?