VANCOUVER: UNSANCTIONED SAFE INJECTION SITE OPENS IN MIDST OF POLICE
CRACKDOWN ON DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE HARD DRUG SCENE

The Western Hemisphere's first safe injection site has opened in
Vancouver, BC, but not under official auspices. While in recent
months, officials at all levels have reached a general agreement to
open a safe injection site for the drug-injecting population centered
in the Downtown Eastside as part of the city's comprehensive,
two-year-old Four Pillars plan (prevention, treatment, enforcement,
harm reduction), delays in winning approval for a safe injection site
at the federal level have stalled its opening. That was bad enough for
community activists and users' groups who had worked for years to
create such services, but when Vancouver police swooped down with a
massive and continuing enforcement effort early last month, activists
decided they could wait no longer for the government to act.

"We got tired of seeing deadline after deadline pass," said Robert
Weppler, president of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users
(http://www.vandu.org), "and still no safe injection site. We had an
agreement with the city that they would bring in additional police
after a safe injection site opened, but the police didn't wait," he
told DRCNet. "Instead, they put 44 officers into the neighborhood --
they're still there -- so a coalition of community groups pushed
forward to force open a site."

The coalition includes VANDU, the Pivot Legal Aid Society, the Harm
Reduction Society, the Housing Action Committee and the Anti-Poverty
Committee, all neighborhood groups, said Weppler, "as well as others
that wish to remain anonymous for the time being."

The site has been operating for nearly a month, said Weppler. "We're
seeing about 15 to 30 users a night. The facility is staffed by a
nurse, who doesn't want to be named right now. We have a front room
that operates as a drop-in center where people can come in and warm
up, and a smaller room in the back where we do needle exchanges and
safe injections."

While unprecedented in the Americas, safe injection sites, where users
can inject under medical supervision in a clean, safe environment, as
well as receive access to or information about other services, have
been in operation in various European cities for much of the last
decade, where they have been found to be effective in reducing drug
overdoses and the transmission rates of diseases such as HIV and
Hepatitis C. Vancouver officials, in fact, recently visited safe
injection sites in Zurich as part of their effort to win approval for
a Vancouver site from the Canadian Health Ministry.

The Downtown Eastside safe injection is illegal, but Vancouver police
have so far left the place alone. "That an illegal safe injection site
would open is obviously a concern," said Vancouver police spokesperson
Constable Anne Drennan, "but it's not a high priority. Our focus is
dealers, not addicts. We are very disappointed that those groups did
this now, because we are supporters of the officially-supervised safe
injection site application that has been forwarded to Health Canada,"
she told DRCNet.

"We are monitoring the site, but we will not be taking any immediate
action," Drennan added. "The mayor and the chief of police will meet
next week to discuss various options to respond to the site."

Ironically, Mayor Larry Campbell was in Ottawa this week on a trip
seeking funding for the official safe injection site. Like his
predecessor, Philip Owen, Campbell has been a supporter of such sites,
although he has been strongly criticized by some community groups
involved in the current site for not moving fast enough or providing
resources for the treatment, prevention, and harm reduction pillars of
the Four Pillars program.

"It's more like one giant pillar and three twigs," quipped VANDU's
Weppler.

The giant pillar, of course, would be law enforcement. And the massive
police presence since April 7 has certainly had an impact. On the
corner of Main and Hastings, previously the pulsing epicenter of the
hemisphere's largest open air drug market, at times there were as many
police as people. The crowds of buyers and sellers sometimes reaching
the hundreds were gone. The prostitutes had vanished. Only small knots
of people huddled together on the street.

"We think we've been very successful," said Constable Drennan. "We've
arrested 135 on warrants developed out of undercover buys that took
place in March, and we've reclaimed that block. There has been some
displacement," Drennan conceded, "but much less than we expected."

Still, the balloon effect was obvious to even the casual observer. The
addicts had not left; they only melted into the shadows. The dealers
had merely migrated a few blocks west on Hastings, closer to touristy
Gastown, as well as onto Granville Avenue. And the hookers had moved a
block or two north of Hastings, to ply their trade on darker and
less-trafficked side streets.

"That's creating a more dangerous situation for them," said Wanda
Villanueva, a counselor at the Downtown Eastside Women's Centre, "but
on the Downtown Eastside these women are targeted by police, thrown up
against walls and harassed," she said. "We are worried that at the end
of this we'll only have more missing women."

And while Constable Drennan said police targeted dealers, not addicts,
Annabel Webb of Justice for Girls told the Vancouver Sun a "police
state" had been imposed on the neighborhood. "How else would one
describe the extreme police presence, the mass searches,
interrogations and arbitrary detentions, or the suspension of liberty
and mobility rights of the residents?"

That seemed to be the case last Friday as teams of uniformed police
trolled for suspicious characters, occasionally searching one and
emptying his bags onto the ground. "Yeah, it sucks, man," one local
told DRCNet. "They rousted me a couple of days ago -- didn't find
anything, though. But now there's more rip-off artists down here, you
don't know if you're getting the good stuff," he complained.

And if the Vancouver police officially stand behind Mayor Campbell and
the Four Pillars policy, that attitude hasn't necessarily percolated
down to all of the officers on the beat. Asked about safe injection
sites as he patrolled an alleyway off Hastings, one Vancouver officer
likened them to "giving alcoholics their booze everyday." He could
support treatment and prevention, he said, "but helping them shoot up?
You've got to be kidding."

Meanwhile, Mayor Campbell and the city of Vancouver await approval
from Health Canada for an official safe injection site. That's great,
said VANDU's Weppler. "We'll shut ours down as soon as the legal one
is up and running. There is no difference between theirs and ours,
except one -- we're open."