SAFE INJECTION SITE NOW OPEN FOR PATIENTS

Talk has finally translated into action for injection drug users in
Vancouver. The first safe injection site (SIS) took its first patients
on Sunday night, but not without criticism.

The site is the result of legislation granted by Health
Canada--section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act--that
gives an exemption to allow users to legally inject their own drugs
under the supervision of medical professionals.

Part of the exemption criteria is a $1.4 million research study
carried out by the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS that will seek
to understand the effect the site has on improving the health of drug
users.

"A supervised injection site is an important step in a treatment
continuum and harm reduction that we are doing in the downtown east
side," said Mark Tyndall, of the UBC department of Medicine and the
Centre for Excellence.

The SIS, located in the heart of the drug-ridden downtown east side
(DTES), will be open 18-hours a day 7-days a week and will supply
clients with clean injection equipment such as spoons, tourniquets and
water with the hopes of reducing the spread of infectious diseases.

"We have to put services where the people are," said Vivianna Zanocco
of Vancouver Coastal Health, the body that oversees the operation of
the site.

So far 300 clients have registered with the SIS.

The legislation means that the role of the police will be limited to
ensuring order outside of the SIS. "We will be looking the at [the]
outside of the facility and that is to ensure that there is no open
air drug trafficking or street disorder that occurs," said Vancouver
Police Constable Sarah Bloor.

She added that the police will be doing their best with a limited
supply of resources. "We don't have the same police resources that
have been put in other cities in Europe in regards to supervised
injection sites."

But, not everyone agrees with the decision to open the SIS. "I don't
think this should be the focus at all of drug addiction," said
Alliance MP Randy White, vice chair of the recent House of Commons
special committee on non-medical drug use. "I don't respect people who
spend millions of dollars on this and at the same time allow
rehabilitation facilities to close for lack of money."

White also said that he does not believe the site will cut down on the
rate of infectious diseases among injection drug users because people
may not use the SIS 365 days a year.

"If you use it one day out of that year in some corner some place and
on a dirty needle, that is the end of it," he said, adding, "When
people say its a form of harm reduction I say it is not. It is a form
of harm extension."

The site will help drug users in the DTES, said Michael Botnick, a UBC
sociology professor who researches in the area of HIV/AIDS.

"For people who are injection drug users I think that anything that
provides a safe haven, a shelter and harm protection obviously is
going to be better than nothing," he said.

The research study is hoping to find evidence to support
this.

"We do hope to show that the people using the site are safer,
healthier, more likely to get into treatment certainly less likely to
overdose," added Tyndall.

No one should expect a revolution in drug use in the DTES with only
one facility, cautioned Tyndall. Only about five per cent of the
approximately 4,700 drug users in the DTES will be using the SIS. "A
lot more needs to be done," he said.

He hopes that the SIS will provide the momentum for more initiatives
to reach out to drug users in the DTES.

The research study will last for three years and has secured full
funding from Health Canada. The SIS has secured funding of $2 million
from the BC Ministry of Health Services--allowing it to operate for
the rest of the fiscal year--and is currently looking to secure
long-term funding. "We think it should be coming from the federal
government seeing as how it is a scientific research pilot project,"
said Zanocco.

Botnick thinks that the SIS will have many positive effects on poverty
and drug use in the DTES but he is critical of the amount of publicity
the site has already garnered.

"People really don't like these things in the part of the public
gaze," he said. Botnick is concerned that the site may have become too
much of a political issue. "In my opinion it is not a political issue
at all. It is a health and harm reduction issue," he said.