CANADA APPROVES SAFE INJECTION SITE FOR VANCOUVER

The hemisphere's first officially-sanctioned safe injection site,
where hard drug users can shoot up under medical supervision, will
open in September in Vancouver, British Columbia. While a safe
injection site has been envisioned as a key part of the city's Four
Pillars (prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction)
strategy to deal with its Downtown Eastside, home to one of the
hemisphere's largest and most concentrated hard drug-using
populations, it has been held up for two years as local authorities
struggled to win federal government approval. That finally happened on
June 24, when Health Canada gave the go-ahead to the plan by exempting
the site from the nation's drug laws as part of a pilot program to
research its effectiveness in reducing HIV/AIDS, Hepatitis C and other
infectious diseases, as well as reducing overdoses.

"Under Canadian law and the international drug control agreements that
Canada has signed, the only way a safe injection site can operate is
to get an exemption under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act,"
explained Steve Leary, executive assistant to Mayor Larry Campbell,
who championed the site. "This is officially a research program," he
told DRCNet.

"Everybody in here should take great pride in this," Mayor Campbell
told a surprised city council as he broke the news. Campbell won
election on the Coalition of Progressive Electors slate last year at
least in part because former Mayor Phillip Owen was unable to make the
safe injection site a reality. Campbell pledged to push for the site
and to make the Four Pillars strategy work, but he also credited Owen
with laying the groundwork. "It would be difficult if not impossible
for me to imagine this initiative having come to this point without
Philip Owen," Campbell said.

"There's a part of me that says I'm prepared to try anything to save
people's lives and to help them overcome addiction," he added. "We're
not going to get rid of drug trafficking and drug addiction in the
city of Vancouver. That's not going to happen. What we will do is get
it under control and those people who are addicted will be in a
position to get the help they want."

According to the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, which will manage
the project, the site will offer injection supervision with emergency
response for drug overdoses, injection-related first aid, access and
referral to primary health care, addiction treatment service, mental
health providers and harm reduction teaching and counseling. The site
will offer 12 individual injection spaces and a "chill out" room, and
could serve as many as 850 injectors each day. It will be open 18
hours per day and will be staffed at all times by a registered nurse,
a licensed practical nurse and an addiction counselor.

"We now have the authority to open, and renovations are underway at a
building on East Hastings Street, said Leary. "We should be ready by
Labor Day."

Some Vancouver activists couldn't wait that long. Frustrated by the
seemingly endless delays in winning approval for the site and angered
by a police crackdown on the Downtown Eastside, activists associated
with the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (http://www.vandu.org)
opened an unsanctioned safe injection site in the neighborhood in late
April
(http://www.stopthedrugwar.org/chronicle/285/vancouverinjectionsite.shtml).

But now, they are applauding and welcome the chance to go out of the
injection room business. "We're really glad to hear that the federal
government has decided to get on board with the local government
plan," said VANDU president Robert Weppler. "It makes me proud to be a
Canadian to know that our federal ministers are looking out for the
health and welfare of Canadians. Once the official safe injection site
is up and running, we will close our doors," he told DRCNet.

And that depends on money that has not yet appeared. While Health
Canada will provide US $1.1 million over the next four years to
evaluate the program and the government of British Columbia is
shelling out US $900,000 for renovations for the site, no one has yet
stepped up to provide the estimated US million dollar annual cost of
running of the safe injection site. "The Vancouver Coastal Health
Authority has a million a year operating budget for this," said Leary,
"but the city doesn't have the money to fund it because of our small
funding base. The responsibility lies with other levels of government
to fund this initiative. We've been working with the federal and
provincial governments on this, and we believe there will be funding
in place in time. We're eternally optimistic."

VANDU's Weppler was less so. "It's sad to see this bickering over
costs," he said. "It is a shame that they are playing numbers games
with the health of Canadians. We worry that the different government
levels are going to start hemming and hawing, but we hope the local,
provincial and federal levels will arrive at consensus soon."

If Vancouverites are worrying over how to pay for the safe injection
site, US officials are going ballistic over the very idea. Harm
reduction is "a lie" and "there are no safe injection sites," US drug
czar John Walters told the Associated Press last week. "Drug abuse is
a deadly disease. It's immoral to allow people to suffer and die from
a disease we know how to treat."

But Mayor Campbell, a former narcotics officer and coroner, was in no
mood to take advice from the Americans. "I think all you have to do is
take a look at your prison system and your law enforcement to see if
the drug war is being won in the states," he retorted. "It's an
unmitigated disaster and they know it, but they can't back out of it."
And now, leaving drug war orthodoxy behind, Vancouver is about to
embark on a hemispheric first. Maybe the Americans could learn
something from their northern neighbors.