Grip of drug addiction shapes new ideas to reduce risk of deadly fentanyl
VANCOUVER — Watching an addict fill a syringe with puddle water, former senior RCMP officer Raf Souccar imagined a radical shift in how Canada could deal with people in the grip of drug addition — by providing them with medical-grade heroin and giving them a chance to survive.
“I’ve always thought of these people as victims,” he said, recalling the scene in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, where the man added heroin to the dirty water and injected the contents into his arm.
“I’ve seen a guy injecting with a needle he was sharpening on the side of the curb,” said Souccar, a former RCMP deputy commissioner who spent 35 years fighting the illicit drug trade and is now concerned about the death toll from the fentanyl overdose crisis, which has killed hundreds of people in Canada this year.
The country’s two supervised-injection sites, including Insite, are both in Vancouver. Addicts are provided with clean needles and a nurse who watches over them as they shoot up their own drugs. People who unwittingly overdose on fentanyl-laced substances are given another drug, naloxone, to reverse the effects and then sent to hospital.