NO FATAL OVERDOSES MEANS SITE WORKS

Numbers Suggest Safe-Injection Site Reaches Target Audience And Has
Saved Lives

VANCOUVER - The fact that there have been no deaths at Vancouver's
controversial safe-injection site, even though there were 107
overdoses among 72 clients in the last six months, proves that it is
saving lives, say the site's proponents.

The numbers were collected between March 10 and Aug. 31 by a research
team at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS as part of an
overall evaluation of the project.

"I think we can say the site works because we're reaching the target
population it was designed to reach, we're intervening appropriately
when overdose incidents happen and we haven't had anyone die here,"
said Dr. David Marsh, clinical director of addiction services for
Vancouver Coastal Health, one of the partners in what operators refer
to as a supervised injection site. Its official name is Insite.

Marsh said it is difficult to calculate how many lives the site has
saved because drug users who overdose often recover without
intervention.

But he noted the death rate among injection-drug users is two to three
per cent. And in one of the overdose cases, site staff had to use CPR
on a patient before an ambulance arrived.

The data showed the site has seen, on average, 588 users per day, and
among them staff have referred 262 to addiction-counselling services,
78 to detox and at least one user per week has gone on a methadone
program.

The data showed the busiest times centre around so-called "welfare
Wednesdays."

The busiest day was July 28, when 845 users, some 47 per hour,
circulated through the site during its 18-hour day.

Marsh said he was also encouraged by the satisfaction rating, which
showed 95 per cent of clients rated the site's service as either
excellent or good.

Support for the site hasn't been universal, however. It has been
criticized as sanctioning illegal drug use, and Downtown Eastside
business owners have complained about junkies being drawn to the
neighbourhood.

But Marsh said the survey found 68 per cent of users live in the
Downtown Eastside, one-third residing within three blocks of the site.

A survey of 117 neighbourhood businesses found 46 per cent favoured
the site, 34 per cent opposed it and 20 per cent were undecided.

Those who collected the data about the site characterized it as
process information that should not be regarded as conclusive about
the site's effectiveness in getting people into addiction treatment or
reducing the spread of HIV and hepatitis infections.

Dr. Mark Tyndall, program director of epidemiology at the B.C. Centre
of Excellence for HIV/AIDS, said those kinds of conclusions will take
another year or more to firm up, but the evaluation team is following
a group of 800 regular users to address those issues.

Further details of the evaluation team's work will be published
Tuesday in the Canadian Medical Association Journal.

Tyndall said his team will be able to compare the results from the
study on safe-injection-site users with those from two other major
public-health studies he is conducting in the Downtown Eastside.

One is a long-term study of the health of 1,500 injection-drug users.
The other is looking at 3,000 Downtown Eastside residents.

"It's one thing to be able to follow people who have decided to use
[the injection site]," he said.

"it's just as important to find out what's happening with people who
haven't decided to use it."