SAFE INJECTION EXPERIMENT BEGINS

Victoria Must Watch Vancouver's New Site Closely For Solutions To Drug
Problems Here

Vancouver has begun its experiment with a controversial safe-injection site
for drug addicts. Victoria must watch carefully before deciding whether to
go down the same road.

Vancouver's centre officially opened Monday and will accept its first users
next week.

The site is not a perfect solution, but it seems to be a way of easing some
of the tragedy that addiction brings in its wake, and advocates, including
Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell, hope it will save the lives of addicts.

To be a true success, however, it must do more than save addicts who might
otherwise overdose. It must also draw them out of the drug life and into
treatment.

There is some hope this will happen. The safe injection site in Sydney,
Australia, has found that those users who visited the site were more likely
to start treatment than those who didn't.

Victoria Police Chief Paul Battershill has made it clear he is willing to
consider a safe injection site for Victoria, but only if it follows the
European model of including treatment and medical care.

Simply providing a publicly funded shooting gallery is not enough.

Vancouver's site represents the first part of that city's four-pillars
program: harm reduction, enforcement, prevention and treatment. Cracking
down on drug traffickers, campaigns to keep kids from starting the habit,
and treatment for those who are already hooked are necessary to make up the
other three pillars.

Anything we do in Victoria would have to follow similar principles.

The difficulty is that opening the safe-injection site is the easiest task.
The war on drug gangs has gone on for decades and final victory is only a
dream as long as there is a market for their products. Keeping kids away
from drugs requires unending work by parents, schools, police and
communities, and still there are new addicts every day. Treatment is
heart-breakingly difficult for people in the grip of powerful addictions.

If the safe-injection site opens a door to treatment for some people who
might otherwise be missed, it will be valuable.

Health Canada and the provincial government certainly think it is worth the
risk. The federal department approved it as a three-year pilot project and
the province came up with $2 million in initial operating funds.

In the short term, we can expect to see a few signs of change. In Australia
there were fewer public injections, less loitering and fewer discarded
syringes. All these changes would be welcomed by residents and businesses
in the areas where addicts hang out.

Its success in the long term will depend on the delicate dance between the
already skittish addicts and the forces of law and bureaucracy. A study of
Downtown Eastside drug users by the Canadian Medical Association Journal
found almost all of them were interested in using the site, but that
support dropped dramatically when they were told about restrictions such as
mandatory registration and fell to only 22 per cent when they were asked if
they would use the site if police were posted nearby.

The injection site's success in getting addicts into treatment will depend
in part on the willingness of police to back off, so users feel safe.

In Victoria, the seemingly insoluble problem of drug users who are moved
out of the Red Zone downtown only to emerge further up Pandora Avenue or in
Fernwood makes the safe-injection site worthy of consideration.

The Vancouver experiment will give us a chance to see whether the site does
some good or creates more problems than it solves.