"SAFE DRUG" PROGRAM SHOULD BE RENEWED

Vancouver's Downtown Eastside is a heartbreaking city-scape of dingy
hotels, dirty alleys and hundreds of drug addicts. If ever there was
a place that needed help with a drug problem, this is it.

That's why British Columbia set up Insite, Canada's only
"safe-injection site," there five years ago.

Addicts who used the site, the plan was, could be moved on to
treatment, counselling, and medical care. Lives could be salvaged.

The Conservatives in Ottawa, evidently cool to the idea of tolerating
heroin use, have twice compromised by providing only short-term
renewals of Insite's exemption from criminal prosecution; another one
is needed by June 30.

Despite the problems with the project, a renewal, and not just a
short-term one, would be appropriate.

There is certainly no shortage of research material on how Insite has
worked. Thomas Kerr of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS
says few public-health initiatives have been researched as thoroughly
as Insite.

The latest study was commissioned by the federal government, which
must tread carefully between helping addicts and not hindering the
international effort to combat the illegal drug trade. Last month a
United Nations agency told Canada that Insite is in direct
contravention of treaties Canada has signed promising to be involved
in drugs only for medical or scientifc purposes.

Has the program delivered? Research suggests that it has. But some
questions remain.

Staff at the site have had to deal with 336 overdoses; no one has
died. Of course it is good news that no one died, but how do you
assess this information? How many overdoses, fatal or not, would
there have been without Insite? Is there a more effcient means of
helping addicts? Such questions are pretty much unanswerable.

In the meantime, the experiment seems to offer reason for cautious
optimism. Extending the experiment to other jurisdictions should even
be considered.

Greater outreach also seems to be needed. The federally mandated
report found that although 8,000 people visited the Vancouver
facility since it opened in 2003, 18 per cent of them accounted for
86 per cent of the visits.

If more addicts could be convinced of the merits of seeking therapy
and health care, the payoff to them and the larger society would be enormous.

The carefully designed, modestly successful Vancouver experiment
deserves a chance to see whether it can do even better. Ottawa should
give it the green light, while continuing to watch over it very carefully.