USE SCIENCE TO JUDGE INJECTION SITE, OTTAWA TOLD

Government Criticized For Citing 'Facts' From Group Opposed To
Vancouver's Insite

In the latest salvo in the battle over Vancouver's controversial
supervised drug injection site, 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.
"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 lobby group, the Drug Free America Foundation, 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 Drs. 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 injection site
in Vancouver's troubled Downtown Eastside. Since September 2003,
heroin and cocaine addicts have been injecting street-bought drugs at
the site staffed by a small team of government-paid nurses and drug
counsellors.

The researchers' two dozen reports, published in top-level
peer-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 treatment, and reduced
drug-overdose deaths. The findings have been widely backed by other
investigators.

Drug Free America prefers to highlight a critique of the injection
site that concludes the experiment has had little success. It also
says drug policy in Canada has become so "politicized" that the true
results are being "ignored."

The critique was written by former academic and Canadian anti-harm
reduction activist Colin Mangham, and was, according to Wood and his
colleagues, funded by the RCMP. Mangham says Insite has resulted in
"little or no reduction in transmission of blood-borne diseases or
public disorder, no impact on overdose deaths in Vancouver" and has
lacked impact and success.

The federal government has recently announced a new anti-drug strategy
that leaves the future of Insite in doubt. Health Canada announced in
October it would extend the drug-law exemption, and the Harper
government has given it a reprieve until June.

Wood and his colleagues say they were alarmed when Clement recently
alluded to Mangham's report and suggested there is growing 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.