(Newswire.net — November 24, 2014) — Vancouver, Ca. – Over the coming days, doctors from Vancouver-based Providence Crosstown Clinic will start prescribing heroin as a treatment, as certain quantities of a medicinal heroin shipment arrived.
The first 120 people authorized by Health Canada to recieve the treatment are the same patients who were already on heroin therapy until the federal health minister Rona Ambrose, introduced regulations banning heroin prescriptions outside of clinical trials in October 2013, so medics took the appeal to the Canadian Supreme Court.
Doctors, but as well addicts and patients who are not responding to convectional treatments, put a pressure on court to let them continue using heroin treatment, so the Supreme Court ruled Canadian doctors have right to prescribe certain quantities of medicinal heroin.
“The patients are so desperate for treatment, so desperate to be able to no longer be addicted,” vice-president of Acute Clinical Programs at Providence Health Care, David Byres, told the Globe and Mail.
“It’s a great thing to be able to help them, and help with the addiction that has taken over their entire lives,” he said.
Patients need to come at least three times to a clinic at prearanged time for heroin treatment, and stay while nurses monitor their condition.
Since banning the use of prescription heroin, outside of trials, in October last year, the patients started to leave doctors and many of them began obtaining illegal heroin and treat themselves.
When the Supreme Court lifted the ban, it made Canadian doctors officially the first medics in North America who can prescribe medicinal heroin, while in some European Union countries that is a practice for a long time.
In the UK prescription heroin is already legal and has been widely used across the country for a number of years as a treatment for heroin addicts.
Germany, Netherlands and Switzerland are amongst the countries who allow doctors to use heroin-based treatments for those who do not respond to convetional therapies.