There were 64 overdose deaths in Ottawa last year.

An Ottawa harm reduction worker said that opening a so-called “heroin buyers club,” similar to a model unveiled earlier this week by the B.C. Centre on Substance Use, would “absolutely help people walking through our doors today.”

Rob Boyd, director of the Oasis Program at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre, which offers supervised injection services, told 1310’s Sam Lapratte earlier in the week that the model, which is based roughly off the compassion clubs that helped people obtain medications during the AIDS crisis, would go a long way to help people who use drugs do so safely.

The program being proposed by the BCCSU would be a co-op group that buys medical-grade heroin from Switzerland to sell to club members. These kinds of programs already exist in an informal way, often underground, but they don’t always have guaranteed access to a clean supply. Programs that can buy legal heroin also benefit from cost: whereas a gram of heroin can go for $200 in Vancouver, a gram of heroin costs only a few dollars when bought from medical suppliers. That means less money going to criminal organizations, and cleaner drugs for the people who use them. The end result, in theory, is fewer overdose deaths.

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“I think it’s really important,” Boyd explained, “to understand how toxic the drug supply has become.” Boyd said that in all the months that they’ve been testing drug samples, only one test has produced pure heroin — everything else was contaminated with something else.

It’s that kind of contamination, Boyd said, which is responsible for the explosion of overdose deaths in the city. Last year, there were 64 overdose deaths. “All of that increase is attributable to fentanyl,” said Boyd.

While the idea of providing heroin freely to people can tend to raise eyebrows, Boyd said that it is about helping people survive. And to do that, people need compassion and understanding, not judgement. “People are dependent on these substances, and they will continue to use them, despite our preference that they didn’t,” said Boyd. “We just want to make sure people are able to have more agency and more control with what’s going on with their substance use.”

Boyd said that this kind of program is just one step towards a safer environment for people who use drugs. “We do really need to see a significant shift in our drug policies towards a decriminalization approach,” he said. “I think that’s a really important conversation we have to have going forward.”