A city-appointed working group that would add muscle to the local effort addressing London’s growing opioid crisis, has been referred back to the Strategic Priorities and Policy Committee.
Councillors voted 7-6 Tuesday evening, with support from Councillors Bill Armstrong, Mo Salih, Josh Morgan, Phil Squire, Anna Hopkins, Tanya Park, and Jared Zaifman.
The working group’s members would be tasked with community consultation, looking into the existing approach — including a potential supervised-injection site (SIS) — and developing more recommendations.
READ MORE: Middlesex-London Health Unit receives $250K to battle opioid crisis
“We have two options that are going to get us to the same place,” said Mayor Matt Brown, towards the end of roughly an hour of debate.
“If you refer this back, the same things are going to happen — but it’s going to take longer… and there are people who are using drugs that don’t have time to wait.”
But with a number of groups already putting resources towards the opioid crisis, some councillors wondered about a new working group’s administrative structure, and whether it would be effective.
“Are we forming a new committee? Are we folding some of the committees into this new committee? What jurisdiction does this committee have to even tell these other committees what to do?” asked Squire.
Zaifman, meanwhile, suggested it seemed contradictory to create a new working group for a crisis.
The MLHU sounded the alarm about opioid use a year ago, after discovering local HIV rates were climbing while provincial rates were on the decline. They reported 58 cases of HIV in London in 2016, 70 per cent of whom are drug-injection users. According to the unit’s sexual health manager, Shaya Dhinsa, that’s almost triple the average number of HIV cases per year in the years prior.
READ MORE: Researchers recommend supervised injection site in Old East Village or downtown London
Earlier this year, a feasibility report suggested London create an SIS in Old East Village or downtown.
“The next step is public consultation,” Dhinsa said.
A request for proposal looking for someone to facilitate that conversation was taken off the MLHU website earlier this month.
Dhinsa said drug patterns in London are different from those in Toronto, where public health officials — who were further along in the SIS approval process — have set up an an interim supervised-injection site to grapple with a string of fatal and non-fatal overdoses.
READ MORE: Interim supervised injection site opens in downtown Toronto
Dhinsa says local health officials can learn from Toronto and Ottawa where Health Canada has signed off on SIS facilities.
“I know it took them at least two years to get their approval,” said Sonja Burke, the director of counterpoint harm reduction services at the Regional HIV/AIDS Connection.
“I know it’s a very intense process, I know the rules have changed, so we’re hoping the process isn’t quite as long. But there are many, many steps that have to occur.”
READ MORE: Opioid prescription rates in Ontario stabilize, but many patients exceed daily dose limits: report
A new report by the Ontario Drug Policy Research Network found the amount of opioids dispensed in Ontario fell 18 per cent between January 2015 and last March.
But the number of people being prescribed opioids has stayed relatively constant over the past five years, which researchers say means doctors are suggesting lower doses.
The study found that nearly 40 per cent of long-acting opioid prescriptions dispensed to people already using the drugs for pain, were being given daily doses above the recommended limits.
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