SAFE INJECTION SITE URGED

Would Benefit Community, Addicts: Advocates

Winnipeg drug users will likely be able to shoot up at a "safe-injection
site" within a few years, a community advocate says.

As Vancouver awaits its expected opening of North America's first
safe-injection service centre, John Stinson says Manitoba might not be far
behind.

"The shift that's happened at the political level in Canada is an
understanding that injection drug use is a real issue, and that it's not
going to go away," Stinson, executive director of Nine Circles Community
Health Centre on Broadway, said yesterday.

"And one of the ways to protect the broader population as well as to reduce
health costs associated with people who are using, is supervised
safe-injection facilities."

The reality of Winnipeg's street drug use is expected to be examined next
week when Nine Circles and other service groups join a Vancouver filmmaker
in urging politicians and agencies to tackle the crisis head-on.

'BREAK THE SILENCE'

With a new film depicting Vancouver's shocking drug crisis, documentary
director Nettie Wild will send a message that communities must "break the
silence and speak about the unspeakable" in finding ways to stop the
scourge of heroin and cocaine.

Even if that means launching safe-injection sites to do it.

"It's a matter of stopping the hemorrhaging in an accident," the
Vancouver-based Wild told The Sun from Saskatoon, where she's showing the
$375,000 film.

Her film FIX: The Story of an Addicted City, to open here next week,
profiles a drug epidemic gripping Vancouver's east downtown during the past
couple of years.

Federal Health Minister Anne McClellan is rumoured to be planning an
announcement soon that the multi-purpose facility will open this fall. The
facility will show users how to "shoot properly, so they don't destroy
their veins," explained Wild, but "it is not about handing out drugs."

To be operated by a Vancouver health authority, the centre will cost about
$1.2 million to run per year, said Donald MacPherson, the West Coast city's
drug policy co-ordinator.

Mayor Glen Murray, who has been invited to a screening of the film,
supports the "harm-reduction" approach, Wild says, because "the level of
drug addiction in Winnipeg is so high."

Murray was in Denver to speak at a conference and was unavailable for comment.