VANCOUVER, Canada — Health Canada will now allow doctors to prescribe heroin to people who are severely addicted to opioids as per a recent amendment of their regulations, reported The Canadian Press last week.

The amendment was included in light of the country’s opioid overdose crisis, stated the Canadian daily, and prescription heroin treatment allows health-care providers to treat patients with chronic dependency.

A special-access program is being set up to allow for pharmaceutical-grade heroin to be prescribed for cases where traditional treatment has failed. This reverses the previous conservative government’s legislation on the matter.

The Canadian Health Ministry government will hold a summit this fall to address the issue of opioid addiction which annually causes hundreds of preventable overdose deaths across the country, according to Health Minister Jane Philpott, as cited in The Canadian Press.

The new measure is supported by results of a recent clinical trial in Canada that concluded injectable heroin was more effective than standard methadone treatment. Supervised heroin therapy is used in several countries, including Switzerland, Germany and The Netherlands, stated the media.

British Columbia’s health minister, Terry Lake, spoke with The Canadian Press to say that addicts need every option to help them regain control of their lives.

He said the measure demonstrates the willingness of the federal government to “look at [heroin addiction as] a health-based kind of an issue rather than a criminal-based issue, and that they’re not limiting the range of treatment options that are available because there isn’t one size that fits all in these situations,” he said.

“Given the opioid epidemic that we’re facing, we need every tool that is available,” said Lake to The Canadian Press.