UNAPPROVED VANCOUVER SAFE INJECTION SITE GETS UNWANTED POLICE ATTENTION

Vancouver police are harassing the hemisphere's first safe injection
site for hard drug users, according to site staff and Downtown
Eastside activists. Police deny it. Police actually entered the
premises of the unapproved site on Sunday night, but have been scaring
potential clients away for the last three months by maintaining a
presence near the site, said Megan Oleson, RN, in a statement Monday.

"On July 20 2003 at 1:24am, three police officers forced their way
into the Safe Injection Site at 327 Carall St., questioning and
detaining people accessing the drop-in area of the safe injection
site," Oleson narrated. "The police officers attempted to access the
injection room and were denied access by on-site volunteers, who
demanded that the police present them with a warrant to search the
premises. The officers involved - badge numbers 3202, 1454 and 1886
- - had no warrant to enter the private premises and declared no
reasonable cause to enter the safe injection site. Since April 7,
2003, those who access and volunteer at the safe injection site have
been subject to police harassment on a nightly basis. Through search
and detainment, police harass and intimidate people who frequent the
site."

"We consider these allegations to be fabrications," responded
Constable Sarah Bloor, spokesperson for the Vancouver Police
Department. "We had officers out there working patrol and they heard
loud music coming form the site and they also saw a woman passed out
on the couch," she told DRCNet. "They popped inside and said hello and
no one answered. A woman came from the back and had a civil
conversation. Then a man demanded to see a search warrant and was
quite confrontational. The officers were not there more than two
minutes, and just to address the loud music."

"That's utter bullshit," replied Dean Wilson of the Vancouver Area
Network of Drug Users (http://www.vandu.org), which is part of a
Downtown Eastside coalition of advocacy groups that opened the safe
injection site. "They've been doing systematic harassment, they park
right outside for long periods with their police lights flashing," he
told DRCNet. "They don't learn. The reason we opened the site in the
first place was because they came and fucked with us," Wilson said.

Wilson was referring to the sudden deployment of dozens of officers
beginning in April in an effort to disrupt the thriving hard drug
scene centered on Main and Hastings in the Downtown Eastside. Although
police had earlier vowed to use a light touch in the area until other
elements of the city's much vaunted and long delayed Four Pillars
(prevention, education, harm reduction, enforcement) strategy for
dealing with the city's estimated 12,000 hard core drug users, they
instead began saturating the area. Since then, Vancouver police have
generated a steady drumbeat of civil and human rights complaints from
organizations including the city's Pivot Legal Aid Society, which is
filing 58 separate complaints, and Human Rights Watch, which has
engaged in heated polemics over the issue with Mayor Larry Campbell, a
strong supporter of the Four Pillars strategy.

The site opened when the police landed, Wilson said. "One night 50
cops show up, and our storefront just morphed into a safe injection
site," he said. "Some of them really don't like it."

"They have this idea that we're supposed to be grateful they haven't
shut us down," said Anne Livingston, VANDU program director. "But no,
we're not grateful. They can't shut us down. We didn't ask their
permission to open and we aren't asking their permission to stay open.
So what we get is this systematic harassment."

"I do not believe our officers are harassing people," said Constable
Bloor. "They conduct themselves in a professional manner. Officers in
the area do street checks as part of routine patrol, and no one is
prevented from accessing the site. We have zero enforcement."

Police may not be preventing anyone from accessing the site, but fear
of police is, said Oleson. "Recent surveys have shown that periods of
increased police activity at the safe injection site dramatically
reduce the number of people accessing the site, dropping the amount of
needles exchanged from 150 to fewer than five, while user visits
plummeted from 35 to less than three," she said. And that's bad news
both for the users and for Vancouver, said Oleson. "When users are
discouraged from using a safe injection site, drug-related harm is
increased, particularly an increased incidence of disease
transmission, overdose death and street violence."

While Oleson is demanding an apology from the police department,
according to Livingston, "all we really want is for the police to back
off." It would be nice if they were "better informed" about harm
reduction strategies, too, she added.

While some look to tensions to recede as the city's first
government-sanctioned safe injection site prepares to open this
September, that seems unlikely. "We're not going away," said
Livingston. "There is a need to ensure that the new site is a user
friendly place, and there is a need for more than one safe injection
site in this city."

The Vancouver police, for their part, say they support the coming
authorized safe injection site. "We continue to maintain that other
forms of treatment are needed and we remind people that the safe
injection site is only a research project, but the Vancouver Police
Department wants a safe injection site," said Bloor. "We want to sit
at the table and not interfere, we want to give it a chance."

Maybe someone should remind the officers on the Downtown Eastside beat
that the department supports the notion and is practicing "zero
enforcement" around the current, unsanctioned site.

Visit http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/285/vancouverinjectionsite.shtml
for DRCNet's previous coverage of the Vancouver safe injection site
effort.