MORGAN: The Trudeau Liberals are fighting against safer supply products for addicts

The concept of harm mitigation in dealing with addictions is a simple one. An addict to a substance is encouraged to switch to using a less harmful substance while they work to break the cycle of addiction altogether. The new drug or drug delivery method usually isn’t harmless but is better controlled and can potentially cause less harm to an addict using it. The end goal is to have an addict become clean, but until that happens they can use a safer supply of the substance and reduce the immediate physiological harm in the process.   

The Canadian government is wildly inconsistent in its support for harm reduction methods to deal with addictions, however.

While Health Canada has been supporting the provision of “safer supplies” of drugs for opioid addicts, they have been on an obsessive crusade against safer supplies for nicotine addicts.

Health Minister Mark Holland has been patting himself on the back for days for his plan to use a ministerial order to make it difficult for smokers to find, learn about, or use nicotine pouches as a smoking cessation device. Pouches will only be available behind the counter at pharmacies and no promotion of the pouches will be allowed. Product warnings must be printed on the packaging and the products must be as unpleasant as possible to use since flavouring will now be banned.

According to Health Canada, tobacco use is responsible for 45,000 preventable deaths per year in Canada. That's over eight times more than the number of people who die of opioid overdoses.

The tobacco itself is the prime driver of these deaths rather than the nicotine within it. While nicotine is the addictive component, it’s the tobacco causing the harm.

Burning and inhaling tobacco as a nicotine delivery method adds everything from tar to formaldehyde to carbon monoxide to the smoker’s lungs. It’s those chemicals that cause most of the health issues to smokers. Tobacco chewers can suffer from topical damage to their mouths leading to larger health issues as well not to mention the habit is gross. Nicotine pouches don’t use tobacco and a European study has found that pouches and vapes could be 95% less harmful than cigarette smoking. Why on earth would Health Canada be in such strong opposition to products that clearly offer such potential benefits?

Meanwhile, Health Canada and the Minister of Mental Health and Addictions have been strong proponents of harm-reduction products for opioid use despite those products appearing to cause more harm than benefits.

Hydromorphone is considered a “safer supply” for opioid addicts. While prescribed hydromorphone doesn’t contain impurities as street drugs do, it remains a very powerful and addictive opiate. Overconsumption of hydromorphone will kill an addict just as effectively as a heroin overdose. It's difficult if not impossible for a person to have a fatal overdose of nicotine through vaping or pouches.

Hydromorphone doesn’t offer the high that late-stage opioid addicts are seeking. This leads to the issue of diversion as addicts trade their prescribed hydromorphone pills to their street dealers for more powerful drugs such as fentanyl.

The dealers then market the innocuous-looking prescribed pills to young people which leads to the creation of new addicts and overdoses. Police forces across the country have been raising the alarm of diverted safer supply drugs being seized during busts of organized crime rings. Health Canada is ignoring their warnings.

In fact, RCMP members have reportedly been warned to shut up about it in B.C.

There is no secondary black market for nicotine pouches. Nobody has been purchasing them to sell in playgrounds and there is little to no evidence that new addicts to nicotine are being created by them. We certainly don’t want to see new nicotine addicts, but let’s not pretend the first product of choice for a person trying out nicotine is going to be a pouch. Kids aren’t seeking out the pouches for the flavour either. Banning flavours just makes it less likely that nicotine addicts will stick to the pouches when trying to quit smoking.

If we really are concerned about flavoured drugs holding appeal to children, perhaps we should look at the chocolate and gummy bear forms of consumable cannabis that can be legally purchased in Canada.

Common sense tells us that we need to keep the availability of nicotine pouches convenient. If and when a smoker decides it’s time to quit, it should be easy to find cessation products to fill the void. Having to seek them out from behind the counter of pharmacies. Health Canada certainly promotes the easy and ready availability of safer supplies of opioid products.

Health Minister Mark Holland is pretending his new ministerial order is keeping pouches out of the hands of youth but in reality, his actions are only making it harder for cigarette smokers to find a way to quit. In releasing this new policy at the end of August, we can see it’s not really something the Liberals think will garner popular support. Governments use summer to release unpopular policies while citizens aren’t looking. They know their attack on smoking cessation products doesn’t make sense.

The Heart and Stroke Foundation is applauding Holland’s move. As his former and perhaps future employer, it’s easy to see why they have a tight relationship. That the Heart and Stroke Foundation receives large contributions from a pharmaceutical company that sells nicotine patches in competition with pouches surely has nothing to do with this right?

The lack of consistency from the government when it comes to addiction treatment products makes it easy to start questioning the government’s motives with the issue.