VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The place where Chris gets his fentanyl is bright and airy, all blond wood and exposed brick. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable about the potency of the pills he can crush, cook and inject.
Soft pop music played, and an attendant spritzed a bit of Covid-cautious spray on his seat before he settled into a booth on a recent afternoon with a couple of red-and-yellow pills, a tourniquet, a tiny candle and a lighter.
VANCOUVER, British Columbia — The place where Chris gets his fentanyl is bright and airy, all blond wood and exposed brick. The staff is friendly and knowledgeable about the potency of the pills he can crush, cook and inject.
Soft pop music played, and an attendant spritzed a bit of Covid-cautious spray on his seat before he settled into a booth on a recent afternoon with a couple of red-and-yellow pills, a tourniquet, a tiny candle and a lighter.
The new program aims to provide a safer alternative to the fentanyl available on the streets, where the supply is increasingly lethal and is responsible for most of the overdose epidemic that was declared a public health emergency here six years ago.
Dr. Christy Sutherland, a board-certified addiction medicine specialist who set up the program, said its goal was, first, to keep people from dying, and, second, to help bring stability to their lives so that they may think about what they might want to change.
Chris started using pills recreationally in his teens, then moved to heroin. But the heroin supply in Vancouver was taken over about a decade ago by fentanyl, an opioid that is 50 to 100 times as potent and thus far more profitable for the cartels that sell it.
Overdose deaths have surged in British Columbia since the start of the Covid pandemic, as they have across the rest of North America. Some 2,200 people died of overdoses in the province last year, among the 115,000 lives lost to drugs in Canada and the United States during that time. The mounting toll has spurred communities to search for new solutions, and this city has tried more of them, faster, than anywhere else.
Vancouver’s experiments have government support and are paid for by the public health system on the expectation that they will save not only lives but also taxpayer dollars — in reduced emergency services and hospitalizations.
