SUPERVISED INJECTION SITE USERS 'LESS LIKELY TO SHARE SYRINGES'

Even Intermittent Visitors To The Centre Found To Become More Health-Conscious

VANCOUVER - For the first 36 years of heroin addiction, Bruce Godkin wasn't
any kind of advertisement for clean drug-use living.

He used toilet water to fill up his syringes, shared needles with other
users, and threw his used needles on the ground. Not surprisingly, he got
hepatitis C, likely from an infected needle, in 1980.

Last year, Godkin, then 49, moved to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and
started using the area's supervised injection site.

In his two or three visits a day, nurses and staffers drummed it into him
that he could avoid a lot of skin infections by keeping his equipment
sterile and heating up his heroin first to keep out impurities. And he was
warned constantly about the health risk of sharing needles -- one of the
number-one ways that HIV and Hep C turned into an epidemic in the Downtown
Eastside in the 1990s.

"It's changed my practices," says the courtly-sounding Godkin, who was
released from Kent prison last year after serving 18 years for armed
robbery and manslaughter. "Now I carry those little blue bottles [of
disinfected water] with me all the time and I wouldn't dream of using one
if I found it open in an alley. It has to be sealed."

As for sharing needles: "Now I won't share a needle with anybody."

That kind of profound behaviour change is not unique to Godkin.

A study to be published today in the prestigious medical journal The Lancet
concludes that drug users who go to Vancouver's supervised-injection site
even occasionally are less likely to share syringes than those who never,
or almost never, go.

While at first glance it might seem self-evident that people using a
supervised site don't share needles, one of the study's authors said most
drug users don't use the site exclusively, yet they appear to be changing
their behaviour even when they're off-site, compared to others.

"It appears the use of the site is having a strong protective effect
against syringe-sharing," said Dr. Thomas Kerr of the B.C. Centre for
Excellence in HIV/AIDS.

The study's findings came from surveys done of a large group of drug users
that the centre's researchers have been tracking for years.

The surveys showed that 90 of 431 active drug users questioned were using
the site for some or all of their injections.

Before the site opened in September 2003, those users had been just as
likely as the rest to share syringes.

Afterwards, those 90 were 70-per-cent less likely to share syringes than
the remaining 341. Although that's something many researchers presumed
would be the case, this is the first study to provide the data.

The safe-injection site, a three-year pilot study operated by Vancouver
Coastal Health that has now been open 18 months, sees about 14,000
injections a month by 1,200 to 1,300 users. In all, about 3,800 people have
used the site so far, with about a third using it only once a month and a
small number using it 50 times or more a month. There have been more than
200 overdoses, but none fatal because staff are on hand to provide
emergency help.

The Centre for Excellence research only examined syringe-sharing, but
regular users at the site make it clear that learning about how to take
better care of their health has affected the way they deal with all kinds
of drug-use issues.

Godkin mostly tries to use the site to inject, but sometimes the line-up
for the 12 available stalls is too deep, so he ducks into an alley.

"But even if I go into an alley to use, I'm very aware of my equipment. I'm
picky about keeping my equipment clean. When I'm done with a needle, I put
the orange top on, snap the tip off, and drop it in one of the yellow boxes
on the poles in the alleys. It's helped me think of the safety of others."