urban health

There might be no agency in British Columbia that understands the severity of B.C.’s overdose epidemic better than the province’s coroners service. Over the last five years, more than 3,800 bodies have passed through its offices in cases where the cause of death was subsequently identified as an illicit-drug overdose.

A large group of B.C. nurses can now prescribe a range of opioid substitutes that are used to treat addictions to drugs like heroin and fentanyl.

Nearly $1 million a day is spent providing low-cost housing, social services and other support to vulnerable residents of the Downtown Eastside, a Vancouver Sun investigation has found.

The news outlet compiled, for the first time in recent history, a list of every agency that operates in the Downtown Eastside or provides a service there, and also tallied the organizations’ annual revenues.

In 2013, $360 million was spent by 260 agencies and housing sites to help roughly 6,500 people. Most are poor; many have addictions or mental health challenges.

The Conservative government has released their new proposed legislation on prostitution, and sadly, it is pretty much what you would expect. You can read a summary of the new bill here and the complete text here.

The provincial government doubled the capacity on Wednesday of Vancouver’s Inner City Youth team, which helps homeless or nearly homeless youth with mental illness or addictions.

The team includes psychiatrists and other mental health and support workers, and does work in downtown Vancouver and at St. Paul’s Hospital.

For every $10 invested in housing the mentally ill or drug addicted, $9.60 was saved in taxpayer-funded services such as emergency rooms and shelter beds, according to a $110-million national study.

In other words, by spending four-per-cent more, society’s most troubled homeless people could transition from living in precarious or no housing with little support to a safe place with services to help them stabilize.

“On average, the intervention comes close to paying for itself among high-needs participants,” says the final report involving the At Home/Chez Soi project.

Doctors treating addicts from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside have been asking the federal government to extend a trial program under which they were allowed to write prescriptions for diacetylmorphine. Health Minister Rona Ambrose has opposed extending the program. On March 25, Providence Health Care took the doctors' case before the British Columbia Supreme Court.

Why is diacetylmorphine controversial? Because it's better known by the trade name it had before it was made illegal: Heroin.