RESEARCHERS SLAM TORIES OVER SAFE DRUG SITE CONTROVERSY

Leading researchers are criticizing the Harper government for not
differentiating between legitimate science and a report endorsed by a
U.S. law-and-order lobby group about Vancouver's controversial safe
drug injection site.

"Alarmingly," they say, Health Minister Tony Clement has been citing
the lobby group report as evidence of growing "academic debate" over
the safe injection site.

In a report published Monday in a British medical journal, they say
advancing evidence-based public health in Canada "will now require
that politicians are able to tell the difference between valid
peer-reviewed science and essays posted on the websites of lobby groups."

The Drug Free America Foundation lobby group is dedicated to
strengthening laws to hold drug users and dealers criminally
accountable for their actions. The group's online journal, "which to
the untrained eye could easily be mistaken for a scientific journal,"
disseminates material and essays that oppose the concept of harm
reduction, researchers and doctors Evan Wood, Julio Montaner and
Thomas Kerr say in an article published Monday in The Lancet
Infectious Diseases, a British medical journal.

Wood, Montaner and Kerr of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS
are principal investigators at INSITE, an experimental safe injection
site in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Since September 2003, heroin
and cocaine addicts have been injecting street-bought drugs at the
site staffed by government-paid nurses and counsellors.

The researchers' two dozen reports, published inpeer-reviewed
journals, conclude that INSITE has reduced the number of syringes on
the street, reduced syringe-sharing that can spread infection,
increased entry into detox, and reduced drug-overdose deaths.

Drug Free America prefer to tout a critique of the injection site. The
critique was written by Colin Mangham, a former academic and was,
according to Wood, funded by the RCMP. Mangham says INSITE has
resulted in "little or no reduction in transmission of blood-borne
diseases or public disorder (and) no impact on overdose deaths in Vancouver."

Wood and his colleagues say they were alarmed when Clement alluded to
Mangham's report and suggested there is academic debate about safe
injection sites. "If the health minister equates a report from an
RCMP-funded, advocacy group to 24 peer-reviewed scientific papers,
including articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, then
Canadians need to be worried about the person who is in charge of
public health in this country," Wood said Monday.

Clement could not be reached for comment.