Health Officials Regulated by Health Canada on Heroin Study

This article was last updated on April 16, 2022

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New regulations for Health Canada were announced by Harper government on Thursday, which are mainly meant to deny providing heroin to Vancouver addicts involved in clinical research. This move has come almost less than a year after the former federal health minister declared that political interference in the drug approval process was a “recipe for disaster.”

It was announced in a statement issued by Health Canada last week that it has approved prescribing heroin to the study participants, however the decision was overruled by new regulations enforced immediately by Health Minister, Rona Ambrose, on Thursday. Simultaneously, the Conservative party is also arranging a fundraising drive linked to the issue. In a statement issued at a news conference in Ottawa, Ambrose stated that “the prime minister and I do not believe we are serving the best interests of those addicted to drugs and those who need our help the most by giving them the drugs they are addicted to.” She added that “the answer of course is not to treat heroin addiction with heroin … Our goal must be to take heroin out of the hands of addicts. We must focus on treatment and we must focus on recovery.”

The regulations are aimed to “protect the integrity” of Health Canada’s special access to medication program by denying doctors the right to use it to provide illegal drugs like heroin or cocaine to patients. According to a statement issued by Health Canada, it stated that the special access program provides emergency access to medicines not yet available in Canada to doctors treating patients with “serious or life-threatening conditions when conventional therapies have failed, are unsuitable, or unavailable.”