The Alberta government plans to cut funding for an opioid treatment program offered as a last resort to people with severe addictions when other therapies are ineffective. The government says 65 people on injectable opioid agonist treatment (iOAT), a two-year pilot program, will be transferred to other health services before funding for the program ends on March 31, 2021. Doctors only refer a client to the iOAT program when other treatments fail, according to Alberta Health Services background documents. Schulz said she learned about the government's decision on Friday, one day after the Supervised Consumption Services Review Committee publicly released its findings. Staff at the province's seven consumption sites have tended to more than 4,000 overdoses since doors opened in 2018 and no client has died, according to AHS statistics.

Source: CBC News March 09, 2020 12:00 UTC