VANCOUVER — A national research group recommends health-care providers offer injectable medical-grade heroin or another prescription drug to severely addicted patients if treatment with oral medication has not worked to reduce cravings for people who could die from toxic street drugs.
Dr. Nadia Fairbairn, an addiction specialist at St. Paul’s Hospital, said a guideline published Monday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal outlines best practices for innovative treatment that has been lacking during an overdose crisis that claimed 4,460 lives in Canada last year.
“I think we really are going to need to think about how history’s going to look back on this era where we’re losing so many Canadians to a totally preventable cause like opioid fatalities,” said Fairbairn, the lead investigator for the Canadian Research Initiative on Substance Misuse, a research consortium.
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