LINES GET BLURRY ON IDEOLOGICAL DIVIDE

Watchdog Group Blasts Research on Insite

An influential recent study by local medical researchers bolstering
Vancouver's safe-injection site has been blasted by an anti-drug
watchdog group for greatly overstating Insite's impact in reducing
nearby overdose deaths.

The watchdog team, including B.C. drug-prevention expert Colin Mangham
and three Australian doctors, alleges the local study -- published in
The Lancet shortly before the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments
about retaining Insite -- made "inexcusable" research errors.

The analysis was done for the Drug Prevention Network of Canada and
Real Women of Canada, staunch opponents of supervised injection sites
and other "harm-reduction" methods of dealing with illegal drug use.

The analysis said the study's claim of heavily reduced OD death rates
near Insite after it opened in September 2003 was possible only
because the researchers chose 2001 -- a year when Vancouver was awash
with heroin -- as their starting point. A study period starting from
2002, it said, would have actually shown an increasing trend of
overdose deaths.

The watchdog group said The Lancet researchers failed to mention that,
since April of 2003, extra police were specifically assigned to the
city blocks surrounding Insite -- and omitted to account for the fact
that a substantial proportion of the overdose deaths in question were
"non-injection-related."

When The Lancet article was published in April, co-author Dr. Thomas
Kerr, of St. Paul's Hospital, said the Tories could no longer go
around saying the evidence was unclear "because the evidence is clear,
Insite saves lives." It was a claim carried widely in the mainstream
media.

However, Drug Network of Canada board member Al Arsenault, a former
Downtown Eastside beat cop, said Thursday the analysis by Mangham and
his team showed the evidence was anything but clear.

"It's clear to all those who agree with him in his peer-review
circle," he said, "but not to outsiders who don't have a vested
interest in the outcome."

Dr. Evan Wood, an internal medicine specialist at St. Paul's Hospital
and coauthor of The Lancet study, agreed Thursday that a public debate
about drug policy was badly needed. But he insisted it was the
analysis itself that was seriously flawed, which was why it hadn't
been published in a medical journal.

"Many of the queries, questions and concerns are inaccurate," Wood
told me, adding that the analysis didn't properly account for
population increases or the location of deaths identified in The
Lancet article.

Judging by how deeply divisive the issue has been so far, you can be
sure the arguments and counter-arguments will continue at least as
long as the legal battle between Victoria and Ottawa over Insite's
future.

Ideologically speaking, I'm inclined to side with Mangham and Co.,
since I favour getting people off drugs rather than keeping them on
them.

What really concerns me, though, is the blurring of the lines between
political activism and scientific research taking place on both sides
of this ideological divide.

But then I'm still naive enough to believe that truth should be
science's main goal, not its first casualty.