DYING FOR A CHANGE ON SAFE-INJECTION SITE

A health-care facility that saves lives and prevents the transmission
of deadly diseases should be hailed as an innovative advancement in
medical care - not a political football to be punted around by the
government of the day.

Unfortunately, however, the federal Conservatives continue to play
deadly games with Insite, North America's first supervised injection
site. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper, the Conservatives have
consistently ignored scientific evidence showing that Insite reduces
behaviour that causes HIV and other infections, increases uptake into
detox, and decreases public disorder.

And now a landmark study undertaken by the B.C. Centre for Excellence
in HIV/AIDS and published by the international medical journal The
Lancet shows that Insite also dramatically reduces overdose deaths.

The evidence is absolutely clear: Insite provides essential,
life-saving benefits to people who desperately need them and improves
community health and safety in Vancouver's poorest urban
neighbourhood. The only roadblock standing in the way of offering
similar benefits in other Canadian cities and to people in need
throughout the country is the federal Conservative Party.

Mr. Harper and his team of moralistic crusaders have done everything
in their power to shut down Insite, including challenging court
decisions that favour the continued operation of the facility and
commissioning biased and misleading pseudo-research to discredit the program.

As the Conservatives' court challenges slowly wind their way through
the legal system, the resultant uncertainty has two debilitating
results: It ensures that Insite remains unable to grow and meet the
demand for its services, and it prevents other Canadian jurisdictions
from establishing desperately needed supervised injection sites of their own.

The Conservatives' rejection of these sites is costing lives. Insite
is a pilot facility with only 12 injection seats that operates at
full capacity. Health-care providers at the facility supervise more
than 500 injections a day. Significantly, not a single overdose death
has been recorded at Insite - though thousands of overdoses have
occurred at the facility since it opened in 2003.

Outside the facility is a more sobering story: The neighbourhood
surrounding Insite has an estimated 5,000 injection drug users.
Obviously, many of the people in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside who
want to use the facility can't. Deadly diseases continue to spread,
and overdose deaths continue to accumulate.

Supervised injection sites are not a panacea for all the issues
associated with injection drug use. They should be considered a
critical piece of a comprehensive strategy to deal with addiction and
its related ills. These should include services such as needle
exchange, decriminalization of illicit drug users, medicalization of
illicit drugs, low threshold detox, supportive housing and retraining
initiatives tailored to the needs of people who use drugs.

Rather than challenging the legitimacy of a life-saving health-care
facility that prevents the transmission of deadly diseases, we should
be implementing supervised injection sites across the country. For
many Canadians, having such a facility nearby and its services
readily available is a matter of life and death.

Canadians must tell the federal Conservatives to support
evidence-based health and drug policies and to drop their court
challenge to Insite. People shouldn't have to pay with their lives
for misguided policies based on the moral convictions of a comparative few.