Supervised injection: an intravenous triumph
(10/16/11 4:52am)
This summer Trevor Thomas wrote a series about supervised injection and his experience at a facility in Canada called Insite.
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This summer Trevor Thomas wrote a series about supervised injection and his experience at a facility in Canada called Insite.
With the large amount of scientific support behind Insite, one might wonder why the Canadian federal government would even challenge the facility. Dean Wilson is perhaps one of the most renowned advocates of the Downtown Eastside. At a Harm Reduction Forum held in May, he cited pressure from the United States as a primary cause of the Canadian Federal Government’s attack on Insite. Dean even mentioned that the American government was willing to soften certain taxes if Canada did not open Insite in 2003—a particularly shocking notion. Scientist Will Smalls, a man whose name you can find on many of the articles published about Insite, believes that supervised injection faces so much opposition because of a general “lack of compassion for addicts,” about which he spoke at the same forum. Supervised injection appears to be a method of healthcare that society and law simply haven’t caught up with yet.
I was offered drugs three times during my first walk down Hastings. Homeless men with unkempt beards would ask me for cigarettes and then rescue used butts from the sidewalk, hoping that they might have some tobacco left in them. People openly injected and smoked drugs in public–it reached a point where I was beginning to forget that heroin and cocaine are illegal substances. As I tripped over the used syringes that decorated the sidewalks and alleys, I was beginning to witness the reality of “Canada’s poorest postal code.” This was Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, today was May 10, and this was my first day volunteering at Insite.
Coupled with the exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act was a requirement that Insite be subject to a variety of rigorous scientific evaluations upon its opening. This was to demonstrate whether such a controversial facility was actually improving the Downtown Eastside or if it was actually promoting drug use, the chief fear of those opposed to supervised injection. The first several years of studies have yielded many different scientific reports, including more than 30 peer-reviewed articles in some of the world’s most prominent journals, all of which support Insite and validate the success of supervised injection. There has not been a single article or empirically based critique of Insite that shows it to be ineffective or hazardous to public sanctity. It is important that people become familiar with the objective data from examinations and judge them in lieu of outrageous political statements and policy-based lobbying.