INSITE ONSITE: CONCORDIA LAUNCHES 16TH ANNUAL HIV/AIDS LECTURE SERIES
WITH HARM REDUCTION ACTIVIST.

Harm reduction activist Gillian Maxwell spoke at Concordia last
Thursday. Maxwell, who works with several British Columbia lobby
groups that have supported the Insite safe injection facility in it's
fight to stay open, spoke about community involvement with harm
reduction programs as part of the 16 annual Concordia University
HIV/AIDS Lecture Series.

Maxwell sat down with The Concordian to talk about her work.

"The world is totally in agreement about harm reduction because of
the spread of HIV. The World Health Organization, the Red Cross,
different parts of the United Nations, including the Secretary
General are all on record saying harm reduction is essential in order
to fight HIV/AIDS, particularly with injection drug users," said Maxwell.

"Harm reduction and the goal of Insite is reducing the harm to people
while they're doing harmful things, rather than trying to get them to
stop. On a practical level, you can't make someone stop: the idea is
to help them stop sharing needles and to stop them from overdosing
and dying. The basic idea is to stop the spread of disease. Having
people be responsible for taking care of themselves is a little step,
but a big step to have somebody not injure themselves as much as they
have been."

"You can look at people's addiction problems from many perspectives
and many people look at it from a moral point of view and they think
it's bad and wrong and they want people to stop. The truth is people
mostly do what they need to do for themselves and when they're forced
to do things sometimes it works, but there is a high failure rate of
people going into addiction treatments. Drug Courts are a good
example of that, people go to avoid jail, but the recidivism rate is
very high."

Maxwell defines Insite's success by the numbers both in dollars saved
to the health care system and in the declining spread of dissease.
"It is a benefit to the individual from a community point of view and
from an economic one. Insite was a trial for three years and a lot of
research was conducted showing the decreased rates of HIV and
Hepatitis-C. Over 25 peer reviewed papers were published in
international medical journals . . . all were positive, that it works
and it should continue."

Despite these favourable findings, Insite has been met with
opposition: "Insite had an exemption under the federal controlled
Drugs and Substances Act. However, during the time Insight was in its
three-year trial, the federal government changed and the
Conservatives came in and they just don't like it. They ignored the
evidence and scientific results. It doesn't fit in their world of how
things would be, and they think people who use drugs are wrong and
bad and should be punished. It is an old way of looking at things and
we (as a nation have) progressed."

Critics say that places like Insite are enabling drug use. "Not
everyone agrees. There are a very small minority, whether extreme
groups or mostly religious based groups, who say the only answer is
abstinence. It just indicates a very limited way of thinking and that
is not how life works. You have to engage these people: you have to
include them, but you also have to be realistic that the majority of
people will 'thank you' for the information."

With the Federal election next week, Maxwell said she'd like to see
positive action from Canada's next government. "The Conservative
government has taken us in a completely different direction. Canada
used to be more of a leader in this field in North America with the
first safe injection site and now we're going back into the dark ages
on an international scale and everybody has noticed, it's an embarrassment."

"I will like them to acknowledge all the research that says this is a
health care facility. To also give supervised injections sites their
blessing and open the doors for other part of the country. Not
everybody needs them, but whatever jurisdiction need them to open
them." However, fundamentally, even to concede to Canada's Charter of
Rights and Freedoms would be a satisfying start: "Underlying all of
this are social justice and human rights issues. Ultimately, as long
as we call them criminals because they decide they like cocaine or
heroin or marijuana is totally unacceptable. I think Canada has to be
engaged in a dialogue about our drug policies to explain why it
doesn't work and why drug use should be on a continuum of beneficial
use to very harmful use. I feel very strongly that our drug policies
are similar to slavery, women's rights, gay rights - all those
previous things in human rights history where there has been a target
population where you say 'those people are really bad.'"

"It doesn't make sense to just let them get really sick because they
become a big drain on the health care system: we have a duty to take
care of them. I'll never change Stephen Harper's or Tony Clement's
mind, but maybe some of the people around them will say there is a
point about what we're doing."