Canada’s harm reduction legacy is under threat. We must not turn back

Canada pioneered harm reduction in North America with the opening of Vancouver’s Insite, the country’s first legal supervised-consumption site (SCS), in 2003. This was nearly two decades before the first such authorized site opened in the United States. Building on scientific evidence emerging out of European countries such as Switzerland, Canada also introduced the first heroin-assisted treatment programs in North America in 2005. These programs provided a crucial option for people with opioid dependency who were unresponsive to other treatments and medications, such as buprenorphine and methadone.