We have ~400 overdoses per month here. ~20% of that is fatal overdoses because those ODs are from users doing it by themselves and not inside one of the shootin

We have ~400 overdoses per month here. ~20% of that is fatal overdoses because those ODs are from users doing it by themselves and not inside one of the shooting galleries we have set up. The safe injection sites work as advertised but for many reasons some addicts don't go there, mainly because debt collecting gangsters and drug dealers hover all around the front doors, and stigma of standing in an addict lineup that spreads for blocks for all to see. There's a few reports here from VANDU a group run by addicts on the effectiveness of peer-run supervised injection sites and needle exchanges, meaning run by other addicts instead of government employees http://www.vandu.org/reports/ http://www.vandu.org/reports/ The problem is synthetic opioid is being used to buff out heroin so street dealers can save money by importing less heroin from India (how it comes into Canada). They keep coming up with new synthetics to bypass precursor prohibition or import laws, plus China has factories pumping this shit out legally which can easily be smuggled since it costs far less than heroin from India/Afghanistan. Whenever you talk to a street addict basically the reason they got on heroin was they had some other substance abuse problem, usually cocaine, alcohol or meth, there was a shortage of that substance because either they couldn't afford it, busts made it scarce, or they were in jail so through peers they accessed heroin instead and got hooked. Methadone doesn't work, they've already abandoned that idea here and moved to just handing out heroin to the worst cases, or hydromorphone which has a proven success rate in weening addicts off drugs. Somewhere in all this is a solution that doesn't involve enabling career bums who want free heroin for life and doesn't involve 400+ ambulance calls per month draining our resources.