VANCOUVER A LABORATORY FOR STUDYING DRUG USE

The U.S. government is spending $3 million to study Vancouver's injection
drug users.

Thomas Kerr, an investigator with the locally based Vancouver Injection
Drug Users Study, said the American money will pay for another five years
of research and create a research program to monitor youth who become
intravenous drug users.

Kerr said the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the
National Institutes of Health, is interested in the Vancouver project
because of its value as a study of the intravenous drug using population.

"There are very few ongoing studies of injection drug users in the world
and Vancouver's is unique because of the complex issues in the Downtown
Eastside and new prevention programs being initiated," said Kerr, referring
to the city's supervised injection site.

"It's not about harm reduction, it's about the study of the natural history
of drug addiction. We also want to follow youth who are at risk of drug
injection and begin injecting. We want to know why some people start and
what is the course of that problem."

The Vancouver study was created in 1996 by the B.C. Centre for Excellence
in HIV/AIDS to investigate the HIV epidemic in the Downtown Eastside.

"We documented HIV infection among injection drug users in the Downtown
Eastside and that alerted policy makers. It was our investigators that
initially reported the 19 per cent HIV incidence rate. That was the first
warning that something really awful was happening. Since then we've
documented the dynamics of the HIV epidemic, including risk behaviours and
risk groups, such as women and aboriginals."

The U.S. National Institutes of Health had previously given the Vancouver
study $1.5 million in research funding between 1998 and 2001. Since then,
the research project has relied on provincial and federal funding.

Kerr said researchers spend $60,000 a year paying the 1,500 injection drug
users in the study to answer questions and provide blood samples every six
months.

"People often make a big deal about drug users being paid to participate in
a study, that the money might be spent on drugs. But if the study was a
heart medication you would receive an honorarium, there's nothing unusual.
It would be unethical to treat drug users any differently," said Kerr, who
has a doctorate in educational psychology.

Kerr said researchers track participants if they leave the Vancouver area
and try to refer them to social services.

"Our study staff are exceptionally good at following people, whether they
go to prison or back to a [native] reserve or move provinces. We are
interested in mobility, so if they move out of the area we won't stop
following them," Kerr said.