CITY COUNCIL BACKS INJECTION SITE

Drug-Substitution Plan Endorsed Over Calls For 2nd Outlet

Vancouver city council ended a week of speculation yesterday with a
formal declaration of support for the city's safe-injection site.

But the city won't push Ottawa for a second site, which
harm-reduction advocates have demanded for several years.

It will forge ahead, though, with trying to integrate a proposed
research project -- aimed at weaning addicts off illegal injection
drugs and on to legal prescription medicines -- into the city's Four
Pillars strategy on drug use.

The injection site is a piece of the strategy, aiming to give addicts
a safe place to shoot up and professional help for those ready to
attempt withdrawal. It is estimated to have saved some 500 lives last
year that might otherwise have been lost to overdoses.

The substitution-drug project is the brainchild of the newly minted
Inner Change Society, a non-profit group set up with the backing of
Mayor Sam Sullivan specifically to run the clinical trials, which
have yet to be approved by Health Canada.

Sullivan kicked off a heated debate last week by musing publicly
about enthusiastic support for the new program. Speculation arose
immediately that, given the federal Tories' discomfort with the
injection site, he might be shifting his support away from the
shooting gallery and toward the drug-substitution program instead.

Ottawa is due to rule on an extension of the site by Dec. 31.

Yesterday, opposition councillors attempted to force the mayor's hand
by tabling a motion backing the injection site, asking that it be
made permanent and promising the site would not be traded away for
support of the new program.

Instead, Sullivan's NPA colleagues reworded the motion to have it
seek only a 3 1/2-year extension of the present injection site --
which is what the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority has asked for --
and backing only the "general principles and objectives" of the
research trials.

Former NPA mayor Philip Owen, who stickhandled the Four Pillars
strategy into place in 2001, endorsed Sullivan's position yesterday.