NEEDLE SITES ON VANCOUVER ISLAND TO DISTRIBUTE CRACK PIPES

A crack-pipe distribution program driven out of Nanaimo by city
council will become available throughout Vancouver Island in the new
year.

The distribution will be at needle exchanges in Victoria, Nanaimo,
Campbell River and Courtenay, and mobile units running in most Island
communities, said Murray Fyfe.

Fyfe, the medical health officer for the Vancouver Island Health
Authority, said crack-pipe distribution pilot programs have existed in
Victoria and other B.C. cities, but this is the first official launch.

For the first time, the Ministry of Health's harm reduction supply and
services program will fund crack-pipe components -- such as plastic
mouthpieces and filters -- through the B.C. Centre for Disease Control.

Crack cocaine is a highly addictive, relatively cheap and prevalent
street drug used across Canada. Sold in crystal form, it is heated and
smoked through a pipe.

Hep C is the most prevalent viral disease among street drug users with
thousands of new cases each year. The disease is estimated to cost the
Canadian health-care system up to $1 billion a year.

Vancouver Island's new distribution program comes on the heels of a
new study -- HCV Transmission Among Oral Crack Users -- that suggests
the sharing of crack-cocaine pipes could possibly transmit the
debilitating hep C virus between users.

The study, released Wednesday by the University of Victoria-based
Centre for Addictions Research B.C., was conducted on 51 inner-city
crack users in Toronto in 2006. The virus was detected on one of the
22 crack pipes tested because owners had tested positive for the hep-C
virus antibody.

Lead researcher Benedikt Fischer, director of CARBC's illicit drugs,
public health and policy unit, said the study provides biological
evidence, lacking until now, that hep C could possibly be passed from
an infected crack user, likely through mouth sores, on to a crack pipe.

While much more rigorous research is needed to confirm findings, he
said, the study demonstrates the need for targeted, effective
prevention programs for these drug users.

"It vigorously emphasizes the need to look after this high-risk
population of crack users who are typically the most marginalized and
sickly," Fischer said.

He couldn't say whether safer crack-use kits are the answer, but said
such programs are cheap, do no harm and since "we have nothing better"
should at least be retained until we have more answers.

"We're really doing nothing for them, neither in the prevention realm
nor do we have any form of effective treatment [such as methadone
programs for opiate drug users]," Fischer said.

Whereas HIV/AIDS infection rates have stabilized across the Island,
hep C infections are increasing.

Seventy-four per cent of intravenous drug users were infected in
Victoria in 2005, up from 68 per cent just two years earlier.

Clean crack pipes or plastic mouthpieces have been distributed to
users through an AIDS Vancouver Island outreach worker in Victoria for
two years now.

A new program is running in Port Hardy and another planned for
Campbell River early in the new year.