Regaining Their Respect

IV DRUG USERS TAKING RESPONSIBILITY FOR COLLECTING DISCARDED NEEDLES

The street outside is dark as lights come on inside the little office
across the street from the police station on Caledonia Avenue. It's 7 a.m.

Five stick-on letters clinging to the front window spell out a single
word, SOLID. Inside, two men are getting ready for a few hours' work.
Both are drug addicts - one is recovering from an addiction to crack
cocaine, the other still shoots himself with heroin every morning.

Those five letters stand for the Society of Living Intravenous Drug
Users. Its members, all current or former addicts and many of them
homeless, banded together to provide peer support to people living
with drug addictions, to try to stop them from dying from their addiction.

For the last four months, SOLID members have been out every morning,
picking up used needles from the street, giving out clean ones and
guiding people to health services.

Since September, when they got funding from the Vancouver Island
Health Authority to start their street-based needle exchange, SOLID
has picked up 26,000 used needles and given out around 5,000.

As he drinks one more coffee in the office, waiting for enough
daylight to work, Craig Ballantyne, a SOLID board member and
recovering crack-cocaine user who took part in the 2006 squat of the
Janion Building on Store Street, says being drug users and knowing
the streets means SOLID can reach places and people other services can't.

"We generally get a lot more respect on the street because people
know us, they see us, they know we're not up to anything," he says.

Getting on the street early means getting the needles, or 'rigs'
before the public has to deal with them. It also means they can get
clean needles into users' hands when no one else can, says Randy,
another SOLID 'rig-digger.'

"That time of the morning it's hard to get a rig. The drug stores
aren't open, the needle exchange isn't open, no one's open. We're the
only guys in town to get rigs (from), right?" he says.

"It makes a huge difference to some people, the way I look at it.
Where you've got drugs and you've got no needles, you're going to use
whatever you can find, man, because you want to get it the drugs in
before the cops get you, that's about it. That's the way it is on the street."

"Alright, it's getting light. Let's get going," says Craig, as the
clock ticks past 7:30.

Over the next two hours, Craig and Randy walk a four-kilometre route,
covering downtown's drug-use 'hotspots,' the places they know people
will inject themselves, more often with cocaine than heroin. The
night before was cold, and with the Extreme Weather Protocol in
effect, not as many people or needles are on the street as some days,
Craig says.

They'll pick up 33 needles this morning, and hand out just two. They
also pick up a coffee can filled with 162 needles from the Our Place
drop-in space on Johnson Street. All the needles will be incinerated.

There are a lot of motivations for them to do the work. It's a little
income - with funding from VIHA, SOLID pays rig-diggers $20 for each
two-hour shift.

But more importantly, they're helping other users protect themselves
from HIV, Hepatitis C and infection. The rig-diggers are trained to
teach users how to inject safely and they'll steer people toward
health services if they see signs of trouble.

The peer-to-peer approach is why VIHA selected SOLID to deliver
services, says medical health officer Dr. Murray Fyfe. Their funding,
$280,000 over three years, is administered to SOLID by the Victoria
AIDS Resource Centre.

Being users, SOLID workers "can reach people that other groups
can't," said Fyfe.

All of that is central is to Craig, who can show off a wall full of
health training certificates back at the office.

But it's also about showing that drug users can take care of their own.

"I don't care who you are, if you're an addict, or whoever you are,
nobody wants to see the drug paraphernalia, the garbage and the dirty
needles hanging around. So we want to go out there and clean up the
community," he says.