Reality check: Is Health Canada giving addicts free heroin?

Anna Mehler Paperny – Global News

The short answer is yes. Kinda: Health Canada has approved funding for medically administered heroin for 16 addicts – and only these 16 – under its Special Access Program. The program’s designed to provide nonmarketed drugs to people suffering from “serious or life-threatening conditions when conventional therapies have failed, are unsuitable, or unavailable.”

It has since been slammed by Health Minister Rona Ambrose on the grounds that its decision contradicts Conservative government policy.

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Calls for supervised injection sites meet resistance in Ontario

Photo by John Lehmann/The Globe and Mail

Thursday, April 12, 2012 – Globe and Mail
ANNA MEHLER PAPERNY

TORONTO — The battle over whether to give addicts a safe place to inject has moved to Ontario from the West Coast.

When the Supreme Court of Canada handed Vancouver’s supervised injection site a legal victory late last year by denying the federal government’s attempt to shutter it, many observers expected the ruling to give rise to similar sites across Canada.

Not so fast.

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