CANADA APPROVES SAFE INJECTING ROOM

Canada's Health Ministry has approved North America's first sanctioned
"safe injection site" for illegal drug users, a controversial project
in Vancouver that the United States has criticised as state-sponsored
suicide.

The clinic, in the heart of the city's drug- and crime-ridden Downtown
Eastside neighbourhood, will provide a setting where addicts can shoot
up under the supervision of a registered nurse in a a legal safe zone.

The aim of the scheme, as with the trial under way in Kings Cross,
Sydney, is to offer "injection supervision" to prevent overdoses,
provide clean needles to reduce the spread of HIV, hepatitis and other
blood-borne diseases epidemic among intravenous drug users, and offer
help to those who want to kick their habits.

The national Health Ministry has granted the program - which has been
endorsed by Vancouver police - a federal criminal exemption. Addicts
cannot be arrested for possessing illegal narcotics while using the
clinic.

"Users can bring their own drugs, heroin or cocaine onto the site and
inject them," said Viviana Zanocco, spokeswoman for the Vancouver
Coastal Health Authority.

John Walters, director of the White House Office of National Drug
Control Policy, this year described the proposed injecting room -
which could be operating by September with the help of a Canadian
government grant - as "state-sponsored personal suicide".

He argued it would enable addicts to continue poisoning themselves in
a clinical setting near the US border.