SUBURBAN DRUG USERS AT RISK TO SHARE NEEDLES

Downtown Users Tend To Use Needle Exchange: Study

Lower Mainland drug users most likely to engage in the dangerous practice
of sharing needles are single, young and male, live outside the Downtown
Eastside and get their needles from sources other than the city's
needle-exchange program.

Those are the findings, published Tuesday in the international journal
AIDS, of a team of researchers from Vancouver.

Evan Wood, the study's chief writer and a researcher at the B.C. Centre for
Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said the findings send a clear message: "Yes, the
needle exchange has been effective. But we need more action in harm
reduction."

The study, which asked 776 drug users about their drug-use behaviour
between January 1999 and October 2000, found that 14 per cent of the people
were "high risk" users who shared needles.

The findings were drawn from the Vancouver Injection Drug Users Study,
which tracks the lives and the health of drug users in the city's Downtown
Eastside, the largest community of injection drug users in the country. The
study, which began in May 1996, is supported by a grant from the U.S.
National Institutes of Health.

The least likely to engage in sharing needles were those who were older,
married, or living in the "Downtown Eastside HIV epicentre," the study said.

They tended to get their needles exclusively from the needle-exchange,
which is run by the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society and uses a
travelling van and a storefront office on East Hastings, rather than a
mixture of sources.

There appeared to be no connection with ethnicity, education, gay or
bisexual sexuality, unstable housing, employment, or frequency of heroin use.

Sharing needles is the main way in which infectious diseases such as HIV
and hepatitis are spread, and Vancouver achieved the distinction in 1997 of
having the highest infection rate for those diseases of any city in the
developed world.

One-quarter of drug users in the Downtown Eastside were infected with HIV,
with a transmission rate at that time of 18.6 per cent, which prompted the
health board of the day to declare a public emergency.

Wood, as several other researchers have done, went looking for the reasons
why Vancouver's infection rate would be so high when it has had a
needle-exchange program since 1989, and needle-exchange programs in other
cities have proven to lower the infection rate.

The city's needle exchange has been criticized locally and internationally
by groups who have claimed it must be partly responsible for the increase
in infections by allegedly encouraging drug use or enticing people to go to
the Downtown Eastside for needles, where they can end up getting infected
by others.

But Wood said that since it is people from outside the Downtown Eastside
who said they are more likely to share needles, the problem lies elsewhere.

He said the most likely needed improvements are needle-exchange services in
areas outside the Downtown Eastside, safe-injection sites, and expanded
access to the exchange service.