British Columbia is in the midst of an enduring drug overdose crisis that continues to claim hundreds of people every year with no end in sight. With a , innovative responses are urgently needed.
Among these responses is community drug checking, which continues to gain traction in both public health practice and research. Drug checking is a harm reduction practice that provides chemical analysis of substances. This is not only to inform harm reduction for people who use, buy and sell drugs (), but also to monitor the supply for emerging trends that inform both the community and policymakers about the state of the unregulated supply, .
As researchers providing drug checking on Vancouver Island, we see value in exploring new ways to deliver this service to reach more people who use drugs, at a scale required to address the current crisis.
Drug checking in global perspective
, it remains an underused intervention that is often limited in both scope and scale. However, innovations in , as well as , are helping to overcome these limitations.
Internationally, groups like the in the Netherlands have been pioneering drug checking and continuing to inform drug-checking research and practice internationally.
While services in some countries remain beholden by archaic , others are finding success in embedding drug checking within novel legal frameworks, .
Drug checking in Canada
In Canada, drug checking has its origins in the festival and rave scene as a grassroots bottom-up response to the harms of an unregulated market. for the last two decades.
The success of drug checking in festival settings for is now in B.C. and .
Drug checking alone is not enough to curb the dramatic increase in drug toxicity deaths in the province and nationally. However, some of its strengths include within the drug supply, as well as evidence for its effectiveness as a harm-reduction measure. It can also be , including safe supply.
Substance: The Vancouver Island drug-checking project
Our has spent the last five years developing and evaluating drug-checking service models while conducting robust multi-disciplinary research in the fields of social work, chemistry, computer science and public health. This research provides evidence to support services that .
On the chemistry side, our research . Public health research highlights . This research supports services that .
Vancouver Island’s unique model of drug checking
In responding to the challenges of scaling up drug-checking services, to increase the reach of these services.
This model aims to fill in gaps in service delivery for diverse communities that are vulnerable to the unregulated drug supply. It also highlights the importance of multidisciplinary research and service design that draws critical insight from multidisciplinary fields to better inform drug-checking services.
Drawing on a network that enables the collection of samples in various locations and communities, our distributed model provides a hybrid, easy-to-use drug-checking program. The program blends immediate portable drug-checking technologies for timely harm reduction with more comprehensive lab-based technologies that provide greater accuracy of drug composition.
Through the use of strips distributed at various sites and connected to a central server and database, drug analysis can be done remotely within our central hub. These results get looped back to service users distributed across Vancouver Island who also have the opportunity to receive further analysis at a later time using a lab-based method called .
This model responds to the unique challenges of providing critical harm reduction across geographical locations and within different communities. Through the distributed model, we continue to evaluate what works best for whom in .
Most consumables in Canada have quality controls that help inform purchasing and consumption decisions. People who use drugs and those who support them deserve the same. It is long past time that we respond to the enduring crisis to the magnitude it deserves.
: is it possible? It is certainly a worthwhile goal with life-saving potential, and we will continue working to achieve it.
Bruce Wallace received funding from Health Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, Vancouver Foundation, and the Island Health Authority.
Dennis Hore received funding from Health Canada, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research.
Piotr Burek does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
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