CANADA NOT DRY –
Jan. 26, 2022 – At this moment, the province is sitting on a regulated supply of smokable diacetylmorphine—pharmaceutical heroin, commonly known as DAM—from a source that could fill prescriptions for at least several hundred people on an ongoing basis; potentially several thousand.
International treaties prevent Canada from cultivating commercial opium domestically, and importing DAM is such a highly regulated and expensive process that there’s no way to make it scalable.
Rather than buying a finished product, nonprofit pharmaceutical company Fair Price Pharma (FPP) used a federally licensed supplier to import the active pharmaceutical ingredients, which it will process into the final medication itself—allowing it to customize a safe supply option that’s not only lower cost, but specifically designed to be smoked.
Street supply heroin is traditionally DAM hydrochloride, the salt form that’s water-soluble and thus ideal for injecting. But it’s difficult to heat it to the point that it produces a vapor you can inhale. FPP’s base DAM doesn’t contain hydrochloride, so it vaporizes at a much lower temperature and can be easily smoked with a regular lighter.
