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Herb

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Pubdate: 26 Nov 1998
Source: Carillon (CN SN Edu)
Website: http://ursu.uregina.ca/~carillon/
Address: Rm. 227 Riddell Centre, University Of Regina, Regina, Sk. Can. S4S 0A2
Contact: Carillon@URSU.Uregina.CA
Copyright: 2002, The Carillon
Fax: (306)-586-7422
Authors: Jamie Woods

A SAFE PLACE TO SHOOT: CONTROVERSIAL SAFE-INJECTION SITES DEBATED IN BC

VANCOUVER (CUP) - Walking into the meeting centre for the Vancouver Area
Network of Drug Users, the first-time visitor will quickly notice three things.

The first thing will be the line-up, roughly 20 people deep, to receive the
evening's bus fare.

Next will be the funk and disco tunes coming from the stereo, the James
Brown and the Kool and the Gang, and the smell of incense.

Finally, it will be the two black coffins in the corner, both with white
slogans painted onto them. The first says: "Almost 2000 people have OD'd
since 1992." The second asks: "Who is the next OD victim?"

Every Saturday afternoon at the corner of Jackson and Powell in Vancouver's
downtown eastside, about 100 people gather for ham sandwiches, no-name
cola, some laughs and some heavy conversation. Recently, on Halloween
weekend, the tone was comparatively light-hearted. Jokes about people's
neighbours and the Vancouver Canucks could be overheard.

Only a couple weeks earlier, however, former Vancouver Police chief Ken
Higgins visited the centre to conduct a workshop to get the group talking
about what they wanted to see changed in the troubled area.

A poll was taken. Nine people said they wanted to see guest fees in single
residence occupancy hotels eliminated. That way, fewer people would be left
shooting up by themselves, and the danger of overdosing would be reduced.
Seventeen others said they wanted to see 911 boxes installed in the area to
make up for the coin boxes that have been removed due to vandalism.

Other proposals included adding more 24-hour washrooms and drug-testing
sites on the streets, and stopping police from driving their cars onto the
sidewalk to clear suspected drug activity But of all the proposals, the
most popular one was the idea of safe-injection sites.

David, a heroin user who's lived in the area for six years, is among those
who believe strongly in the idea. He has three reasons why. In this past
week alone, that's exactly the number of family members he's lost to overdoses.

"I lost three people in my family for that shit, but I still use it," he
said. "When anyone does it, it's Russian Roulette. We need a safe place
where somebody can go shoot."

Going though difficult experiences is one of the reasons people turn to
drugs, says Bud Osborn, a poet and outreach worker in the downtown eastside.

"One of the main things to remember is that 90 per cent of the people
(addicted to heroin) come from trauma and abuse early in their lives," he said.

"It's not so much an attempt to get high, but a way to reduce the pain,"
added Osborn, a former heroin addict himself.

Osborn is one of several experts calling for a new approach to the way
British Columbians view and treat hard drug addicts. Rather than seeing the
issue as one of law-enforcement, Osborn says it's time a "harm reduction"
approach is taken to drug addiction.

"In B.C. we're basically saying (to addicts), 'we'd rather you die than
have you hope to live.' None of the initiatives we've got now will do
anything to reduce the number of deaths."

The number of people in the province who die of a drug overdose has been
climbing steadily for the past 10 years. In 1988, 39 people died from
overdosing and nine years later, in 1997, the number reached 310.

Experts warn 1998 promises to be even worse. By August 21, 254 British
Columbians had already died, surpassing the previous year's total on the
same day by 60.

What Osborn and other experts are stressing is that it doesn't have to be
that way.

Simin Tabrizi, a consultant for Health Canada, traveled through
Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands earlier this year and compiled a
report on what certain European cities had done for their drug using
populations.

In Frankfurt, drug overdose deaths have fallen from 147 in 1991 to 31 in
1997, she writes in her report. The decrease can be attributed to
safe-injection sites and a heroin maintenance program for chronic addicts.

The Swiss government has gone even further. From 1994 to 1997, the
government ran a pilot program where addicts were given
medically-prescribed narcotics. In a study released last year, the
researchers behind the program concluded it had resulted in significant
improvements in health, social integration, and labour-force participation.

They also said the economic benefits had been significant.

For those reasons, Tabrizi says she'd like to see the harm-reduction
approach brought to Vancouver.

"I'd like to see a well-coordinated network that would include detox on
demand, much expanded counselling, a much expanded methadone program, and a
network of support programs that address all of their life circumstances
from housing to nutritional needs."

Osborn has a slightly different take on harm reduction. He says the number
one priority has to be saving as many lives as possible, as quickly as
possible. Therefore, he says, safe-injection sites have to be the top priority.

"Drug users I talk to and know are speaking for safe injection sites. For
them it's a matter of life and death," he said.

But despite the push from outreach and community workers like Osborn,
there's been strong resistance to the idea of safe-injection sites.

Intriguingly, that resistance has come from none other than the agencies
working in the downtown eastside.

John Turvey, who runs a needle-exchange site at the Downtown Eastside Youth
Activity Society, is one of those against the idea. His concern is that the
community won't be able to handle safe-injection sites.

"Eighty percent of the addicts aren't from here (the downtown eastside),"
he said. "So the impact on this, the poorest postal code in Canada with the
least likely capacity to deal with this . . . . We're going to end up
attracting them and entrenching them here in the community. And this
community just doesn't have the capacity to deal with that."

He also says safe-injection would lead to further ghettoization. "It fuels
the kind of containment mentality where they used to take anybody with
'social problems,' whether you were a sex trade worker or an addict, and
keep you within the pound."

Turvey says rather than safe-injection sites, he'd prefer to see doctors
trained specifically to deal with addiction and given the ability to
prescribe injection drugs. But he's quick to point out that even that
wouldn't solve the whole problem.

"There's the whole thing of cocaine as the leading overdose thing. It's
cocaine and alcohol, so just the operational dynamics of assuming that
everybody's going to come and inject in a safe fixing site is erroneous.

"If you smoke or snort or fix cocaine, then you go have a beer, it forms
cocoethanol, and it's toxic. And (by then) you're out of the safe-fixing site."

Osborn disagrees with Turvey's position, and says he's confronted him on
the issue. But he doesn't buy Turvey's argument that safe-injection sites
will lead to other problems.

"They have not created significant enough other problems elsewhere in
Germany or Switzerland or the Netherlands or Australia that they'd say 'Oh
boy, we'd better stop doing them,'" he said.

The real reason some community groups aren't behind the idea is that they
don't want to represent drug users, Osborn contends.

"The years that I've been involved in some of the boards of these
organizations, I've never seen the slightest bit of interest in defending
the lives of the people at the bottom, the people who are most vulnerable
and afflicted in this community," he said.

While the debate over safe-injection sites continues in the downtown
eastside, 10 miles and worlds away, a New Democratic Party member explains
why he's pitched the idea to the party's provincial council, the
grass-roots wing of the party composed of riding association presidents.

Am Johal has written a motion to the council which, if passed, would
mandate the provincial NDP government to open safe-injection sites and
heroin-prescription trial centres in Vancouver.

They will vote on the motion in early December.

Johal says he wants to give the issue a higher profile because it's a topic
most politicians would rather not think about.

"These people are political pariahs," said Johal, who also helped organize
a course that offers downtown eastside residents exposure to University of
British Columbia curricula.

"No politician is going to gain anything from supporting this issue."

But at least one federal politician has taken up the issue.

NDP MP Libby Davies has introduced a private member's bill in the House of
Commons to have safe-injection sites introduced on a trial basis.

Johal says it's about time society acknowledged that drugs are a way of
life for many people, and that they won't be going away. "You look at the
war against drugs, we've lost. It's not going to be stopped."