Prescription heroin for drug addicts?

Dr. Jane Philpott, Federal Minister of Health in a CBC interview suggested people with severe drug addictions perhaps be provided prescription heroin. The minister suggests this may save lives.

Perhaps. The minister added, “I know this is a challenging concept for some people to think about, but the reality is that when people go out on the streets, they often commit crimes to be able to get the drugs they need. They’re buying dirty drugs and they’re dying.”

While all life is precious and drug addicts deserve consideration and care, I wish the federal minister and her provincial counterparts would show real compassion for the up to 1.5 million Canadian chronic pain patients receiving opioid medication from their physicians. For these Canadians, for whom life without their opioids is intolerable agony which can and does lead to suicide, there appears to be little compassion, caring or understanding.

Cut back their dosages to a maximum 50 mg a day, or taper them off to 0 mg a day is the oft repeated mantra. It’s already happening. Chronic pain patients have called my program to relate their terror at such a prospect. They have openly talked of suicide.

How well do their prescribed opioids support their lives? “I am able to function, able to go to work, able to live,” said one caller. Without the opioids? The caller said nothing. Message understood.

I interviewed the editor of the 2017 Opioid Guideline for Non-Cancer Chronic Pain last weekend — professor James Sasse of McMaster University. In light of the statement about prescription heroin for addicts, I will play back the interview today. You will hear me challenge professor Sasse on several points from the guideline as being either incomplete or impossible. Professor Sasse did not disagree.

In coming weeks, I will follow up on the issue of chronic pain patients in Canada whose days begin in agony and for whom politicians, bureaucrats and even doctors appear to have not nearly enough care and concern.

For the federal minister of health, I would add this: Minister, you wish to provide prescription heroin for the severely addicted? Otherwise, they will go to the streets and purchase the “drugs they need.” “They’re buying dirty drugs and they’re dying,” you say. Severely reduce or eliminate opioids from chronic pain patients for whom life becomes intolerable without their prescription medication and you will perhaps be sending these Canadians to the streets. Not to satisfy a non-health-related addiction, but rather to possibly control a vicious pain cycle. Then what, minister? Will you then provide these Canadians with prescription heroin?

Doesn’t seem like a well thought out plan.

Roy Green is the host of The Roy Green Show and a commentator for Global News.