PROOF OF INSITE'S VALUE IN THE NUMBERS

Fatal Overdoses in Vancouver Have Been Reduced 35 Per Cent, Report Says

With a Supreme Court of Canada case looming this summer that could
decide its future, Vancouver's safe-injection drug site has received
an extra shot in the arm from a new report that says it has helped
reduce the number of fatal overdoses in the city by 35 per cent.

The report, compiled by Canadian scientists from the Urban Health
Research Initiative, the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS and
St. Paul's Hospital, goes on to argue that Vancouver's Insite -the
country's first safe-injection facility -should be replicated in
other North American cities where drug use is a common problem.

The team's findings and recommendations were published Sunday in the
prestigious medical journal The Lancet.

With help from the provincial coroner's service, the researchers
gathered data on every drug-related overdose death that occurred in
the city between 2001 and 2005. Using a technique called geocoding,
the researchers tracked where each death occurred and marked how far
it was from a safe-injection site. They studied the population-based
overdose mortality rate before Insite launched in 2003 and after from
2003 to 2005 to compare fatality rates within a 500-metre radius of
the site to the rest of the city.

Results showed that 31 per cent of 290 overdose deaths occurred in
the city blocks closest to facility. Once the site was opened,
fatality rates in this area decreased by 35 per cent to 165 deaths
from 254 per 100,000 people each year.

Fatal overdose rates in the rest of the city once the site opened
decreased by only nine per cent.

"Our results suggest that [safe-injection facilities] are an
effective intervention to reduce community overdose mortality in
Canada and in other cities internationally and should be considered
for assessment particularly in communities with high levels of
injection drug use," Thomas Kerr, co-director addiction research at
the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/ AIDS, and his colleagues wrote
in the report.

Insite was set up in 2003 in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside so that
drug addicts could inject drugs safely, with sterile needles. They
also receive addiction treatment, mental health assistance and first aid.

The neighbourhood is notorious for its open drug market, HIV epidemic
and large numbers of homeless people.

Other medical studies have also argued that the clinic protects drug
addicts from overdosing.

The Conservative federal government has been seen as keen on shutting
down the facility, because of what critics have alleged are
ideological differences with the Tories' "tough-on-crime"policies.

In May, the Supreme Court of Canada will decide if the facility will
stay open, potentially settling a jurisdictional dispute over the
site between the federal and provincial governments.

The B.C. Court of Appeal ruled in 2010 the facility falls under
provincial jurisdiction over health care so federal officials did not
have the authority to shut it down. The federal government appealed
the decision. In 2008, the B.C. court also decided that closing a
health care facility that saves lives violates the Charter of Rights
guarantee to life, liberty and security of the person.

Kerr, the report author, notes that there are more than 65
safe-injection sites around the world where drug users can inject
pre-obtained illegal drugs to help reduce risks involved with drug
use, such as sharing needles and overdosing.

In a column accompanying the report, Dr. Chris Beyrer, Johns Hopkins
Bloomberg School of Public Health, commended the facility's work in
helping drug abusers.

"Supervised injection facilities clearly have an important part to
play in communities affected by drug use. They should be expanded to
other affected sites in Canada, on the basis of the life-saving
effects identified in Vancouver," he wrote.