OWEN SAYS SAFE INJECTION SITES 'A DONE DEAL'

City council may have reiterated its support last Thursday for
supervised drug injection sites, but the plan still has a few
bureaucratic hoops to jump through before it becomes reality.

Mayor Philip Owen, however, says he's not worried about the need for
approval from the provincial government, the Vancouver Coastal Health
Authority and the police, not to mention a Health Canada review of
the national pilot project.

The province, health authority and police board are on record as
approving the mayor's four-pillar approach to drug problems in the
city, including setting up supervised injection sites, he said,
adding Liberal MPs Alan Rock and Anne McLellan also support the idea.
"It's a done deal."

Owen predicts Vancouver could be home to an injection site or sites
by late this year or early next year-after he's retired and a new
council has been sworn in.

"The decision's been made," he said. "Of course a new council can do
anything it likes... but there's public opinion out there that has to
be considered, which is overwhelmingly supportive of this in
Vancouver and right across the country."

Last Thursday, city council agreed to participate in a national harm
reduction pilot project. At a recent Federation of Canadian
Municipalities' meeting in Ottawa, Owen called for three or four
cities to participate with Health Canada in scientific trials of
supervised injection sites.

Owen said Quebec City and Montreal have already agreed to
participate. Now it's just a matter of Vancouver city staff
soliciting renewed support from the province, police and health
authority before sending a report to Health Canada.

A legal framework will also have to be developed by the federal
government, with possible changes to the Controlled Drugs and
Substances Act. Provisions exist in the Act to accommodate supervised
injection sites, said Dr. Perry Kendall, the province's chief medical
health officer, who accompanied Owen to Ottawa in February for the
municipalities' meeting.

Paige Raymond Kovach, spokeswoman for Health Canada, wouldn't
speculate on what Health Canada's review of a national safe injection
trial would involve, or how long it would take. She noted the
government agency is reviewing a similar proposal from a
federal-provincial-territorial committee-of which Kendall is a member.

Kendall said he's anxious to get a safe injection site operating in
the city so politicians and health officials can gauge its
effectiveness.

"There is a substantial body of evidence from Europe that suggests
supervised injection sites can be very helpful in improving public
safety and public health."

Owen believes the trial should last at least a year to see whether
the safe injection sites are having an effect on getting addicts off
drugs and reducing crime in the city.

The mayor downplayed concerns about the city's liability if an addict
overdosed inside a supervised injection site or committed a crime
after shooting up in a city-run facility, saying people sue the city
all the time.

"We've got lawyers, we'll take it on and we'll defend it, but we're
not going to let that deter us because that's not a factor that's a
deterrent at this point," he said.

"If we get obscure and watered-down about all those kinds of things,
we're not being focused on the real objective here. The war on drugs
failed in the United States-we've got this decay now. We've got to do
something and you can't liberalize your way out of it. You can't
incarcerate your way out of it. You can't ignore it-you manage it."

In December 2000, a city-commissioned poll found that more than 70
per cent of Vancouver residents surveyed supported establishing a
task force to consider establishing supervised injection sites to
reduce health risks and minimize open drug use.

The number of illicit drug deaths in Vancouver averaged 147 per year
from 1994 to 2000.