Dear Rona Ambrose,

As a member of the federal government, you are currently titled Canada’s Health Minister. I question the accuracy of that nomenclature.

You have recently taken it upon yourself to void a decision by Health Canada, the public agency granted the task of supervising health practices in this country. The decision authorized a few physicians in Vancouver to prescribe heroin to a selected number of clients, patients who have failed other treatment attempts to keep their addictive habits manageable. The doctors did not seek such authorization because they wish to promote drug use, but because clinical practice and scientific evidence of supervised injection have shown that the provision of this opiate is beneficial in some cases.

Your reported comments were that there are already safe treatments for heroin addiction, such as methadone, and that there is insufficient proof that heroin is a safe treatment for drug addicts. I find your statements puzzling at best. There has been no sign that you or your government pay the least attention to scientific data in formulating drug policies. It would be helpful if you were to cite publicly which studies you have consulted, which ones support your position, or how the many that do not may be lacking in scientific acumen, method or objectivity.

For many years I worked as a physician in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. I can personally attest that some people simply fail methadone treatment. It does very little for them. Their particular biochemistry does not respond to that synthetic opiate. They still need to keep using heroin. It’s just how it is. I trust you don’t like that. I don’t like it either. I wish it were otherwise, but what you or I may wish is not the issue. The issue is reality.

Here is how a University of British Columbia professor put it who worked on a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine, probably the world’s most prestigious medical publication. “Heroin assistance treatment has a very small, but very important, role in the addiction treatment system,” Dr. Eugenia Oviedo-Joekes said. “It is not meant as a first-line treatment; it is meant to continue the care of people we cannot reach with what is available.” According to European studies, those people may comprise about 10 per cent of the heroin-addicted clientele.

In the absence of medically provided heroin in a safe environment, such unfortunate individuals will continue to seek illegal sources of drugs, potentially impure, and inject them under frequently unsafe circumstances. The resulting illness, overdose, and deaths are surely not outcomes you would desire.

The documented benefits, according to Canadian and international studies include:

less crime

better employment outcomes

improved physical and mental health, increased longevity

financial savings to the public purse

enhanced life satisfaction and social integration

Given such findings, Minister, your opposition to this Health Canada permission, which you have moved to block, has little to do with insufficient proof. More to the point may be another statement of yours: “This decision is in direct opposition to the government’s anti-drug policy.”

There’s the rub, that policy. In response to the tragedy of addiction, your government has an anti-drug stance. What you do not have is a pro-health strategy. The War on Drugs you and your cabinet mates favour has been proven, numerous times, to be an unrelieved disaster: it kills people, promotes illness, rewards drug trafficking on a massive international scale, ostracizes and marginalizes the most hurt and vulnerable among our population, destroys families and incurs crippling financial costs. And it has utterly failed to curtail drug trafficking and drug use. In recent decades the purity of street drugs has improved while the price has decreased, despite all efforts to interdict their transmission and sale by draconian legal measures and despite greatly increased drug seizures.

“The bottom line is that organized crime’s efforts to succeed in these markets has flourished, and the criminal justice system’s efforts to contain these markets has really been quite remarkably unsuccessful,” Dr. Evan Wood, Canada Research Chair in Inner City Medicine at UBC, has said. “By every metric, the war on drugs has failed.” As Werner Antweiler, a professor of economics at UBC, has pointed out, “The drug problem has not become less, but more.”

Three years ago I, along with an experienced colleague, were invited to Ottawa to address a Senate subcommittee then considering your government’s omnibus “tough on crime, tough on drugs” legislation, since enacted. The senators from your political party endured our testimony with unflinching politeness, listened impassively as we presented fact upon fact about the nature of addiction and the trauma-burdened life histories of addicted human beings, the flaws of drug-war approaches, the retrograde effects of criminalization, the necessity of harm reduction measures such as the provision of opiates to confirmed addicts. Your senatorial party mates spoke afterwards as if they had not heard a word. Nor do you appear to hear any word that questions what you believe. But what you believe personally should not matter when it comes to the health of human beings.

“I want to be crystal clear,” your predecessor as Health Minister, Leona Aglukkaq, said last year. “I do not believe that politicians should pick and choose which drugs get approved.” Perhaps that is why you have replaced her. Nor does your British Columbia counterpart agree with you. “I know that the thought of using heroin as a treatment is scary for people,” B.C. Health Minister Terry Lake has said, “but I think we have to take the emotions out of it and let science inform the discussion.”

There is that word again, “science.” Based on which, your invalidation of this Health Canada decision will have predictable effects: illness, death, suffering.

I know that is not your intention. I’m sure in your heart you wish, as we all do, that addicted people would heal, that drugs would no longer blight the lives of so many. I’m convinced of that. But an objective regard for the facts leads me to this lamentable conclusion: whatever your intentions are, so long as you embrace policies that promote illness, you are in fact serving as Canada’s Minister of Disease.