HARM-REDUCTION SITES HAVE MET GOALS: ETHICS OFFICIAL

SAINT JOHN - For Dr. Tim Christie, director of ethics services for
the Atlantic Health Sciences Corporation, the debate between harm
reduction and law enforcement policies is a simple one - it all comes
down to goals.

Christie says harm-reduction policies have been able to meet the
goals they set while the same cannot be said for law enforcement.

He cites Insite, the country's first safe injection site for drug
addicts, as an example. One of the main goals of Insite, a pilot
program in Vancouver, is to prevent overdose deaths, something that
was happening far too often in the B.C. city's east end before the
pilot program began.

"(Insite) had over 600 overdose events in the site and no one has
died," Christie said.

"On the other hand, law enforcement has not been able to achieve the
goals it set for itself. They want to interrupt the supply of drugs -
they haven't been able to make a dent. They say want to stop drugs at
the source and they haven't made a dent."

The current federal drug strategy is weighted heavily in favour of
law enforcement. A paper published in the HIV/AIDS Policy Law Review
in 2006 found that approximately three-quarters of the funding in the
strategy is spent on law enforcement while three per cent goes toward
harm reduction.

Christie said there is a price Canadians pay for this distribution of
resources in the national drug strategy.

"There's a cost to failing on the enforcement side and not investing
on the other side, which is proven to work," he said.

Christie said the social costs for an untreated opiate addict are
approximately $45,000 a year. He said that is much more than the cost
of treatment.

The cost for a course of treatment for someone with hepatitis C is
between $10,000 to $30,000, while the lifetime cost of treating
someone with HIV is approximately $240,000.

"Treatment is a lot cheaper and you'll have better outcomes," he said.

So while the facts support harm reduction and treatment methods over
law enforcement programs, Christie said the next step is to have an
ethical conversation on the subject.

"What we need to have is the hard ethical conversation about what do
we value as a society and what values should public health policies
be based on."