DATA ON DRUG DEATHS HARD TO GET

The city's drug policy coordinator wants a study done to determine where in
Vancouver people are dying of drug overdoses to measure the effectiveness
of the safe injection site.

Donald MacPherson said the city has requested the information from the B.C.
Coroners Service but has been unable to attain it because of the research
required.

The Coroners Service doesn't record the information on an electronic
database, meaning collection of those details would require a person to
read through each overdose death file.

More than 44 people died last year of drug overdoses in Vancouver. The
first three months of this year saw 13 people die, two fewer than for the
same period in 2004.

Preliminary statistics don't indicate where the person died or the type of
drug that caused the death. Traditionally, drug deaths have been caused by
heroin, cocaine or a combination of the drugs with alcohol.

"Let's say all the overdose deaths [this year] were in the Downtown
Eastside," MacPherson said. "You'd have to say, 'OK, the injection site is
attracting a lot of people, but it still needs to attract those really
high-risk people who continue to shoot up in their hotel rooms.'"

Tej Sidhu, manager of policy and research for the Coroners Service, agreed
the information would be helpful to the city. Sidhu plans to have a staff
member compile those details before the end of the summer.

"We recognize it's an important statistic to have, so we currently are
working on putting something together."

The closest the city has come to learning where overdose deaths occur came
when a doctor from the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS conducted a
study in the late 1990s.

Dr. Mark Tyndall discovered that 25 per cent of overdose deaths in the
province between 1996 and 1999 occurred in the Downtown Eastside. The
hundreds of deaths in those years were connected to high-purity heroin.

Since Tyndall's report, heroin purity levels have dropped, crack cocaine
has emerged as a drug of choice and the city has opened Insite, the safe
injection site at 139 East Hastings.

The federal government is also conducting heroin maintenance trials in
Vancouver and at least 8,000 people in B.C. are participating in the
methadone program.

The result has been a decrease in overdose deaths, dropping from 34 between
January and March 2001 to 13 for the same period this year.

Since Insite opened Sept. 22, 2003, no one has died at the site. An
evaluation released in September on Insite showed heroin was the addicts'
drug of choice, followed by cocaine. From March to August 2004, 72 addicts
overdosed at the site a combination of 107 times. None of the these
overdoses resulted in death. Only one case required CPR.