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Street markets are saturated with fentanyl these days. In B.C., it’s responsible for a 75-per-cent increase in overdose deaths that led the provincial government to declare a public health emergency. In Alberta, fentanyl overdose deaths have soared 4,500 per cent since 2011.

But Health Canada doesn’t measure the impact of their PDMP policy on rates of overdose death.

Health Canada uses a narrow, exclusionary measurement of successful policy (reduced consumption of prescription opioids). It doesn’t even consider overdose death as an unintended consequence, despite research indicating that this has occurred in other jurisdictions.

Decision making of this sort occurs frequently, and exposes systemic issues in our nation’s drug policy. It contributes to the overdose epidemic that is devastating thousands of Canadian families.

The health outcomes of people impacted in the most acute way are excluded from the very definition of policy success. Heath Canada must measure how their new policies will reduce overdose deaths, reduce stigma and marginalization, and how it will impact the health outcomes of people who use drugs.

Otherwise, we’ve already been written off.

Now for a hopeful prayer.

In an absolute reverse image of the evidence for Health Canada’s PDMP program, research showing that supervised consumption facilities reduce overdose deaths is near unanimous (ergo, reductions in overdose deaths are actually measured).