A Safe Place to Shoot Up

At Insite in Vancouver, British Columbia, cocaine, heroin and methadone users can get clean needles and inject themselves safely with the drug of their choice. Should they overdose, or face medical complications, trained medical professionals are on-site to prevent deaths. Intravenous drug users can also receive HIV testing while at the facility.  Visitors to Insite also have access to limited health care, including gynecological exams and STI treatment, bandage management, as well as referrals for detox and rehab.  As you can imagine, this facility faces plenty of controversy, although it has been around for over seven years. In fact, some staff members are former visitors of the facilities.

Insite receives operational funds from the British Columbia Ministry of Health Services and run by Vancouver Coastal Health and is the only facility like it in North America. Although supervised drug sites have been endorsed by public health officials in Vancouver, this is the only site of its kind in North America.  Similar sites exist in Germany, Switzerland, Netherlands, Spain and Australia.
Insite is located in the Eastside neighborhood of Vancouver, one of the worst areas in the city. According to the Insite website, it is estimated that approximately 12,000 injection drug users spend time within the area. The neighborhood is plagued with homelessness and crime, with drug use and sales out in the open. With HIV rates that rivaled a third-world country, Insite's founders were motivated by research that providing clean needles and a safe haven for drug users protects the community as a whole. Proponents of the site note that providing a place for people to inject themselves safely with clean needles decreases the rate of HIV and hepatitis transmission, and dramatically decreases the number of overdose deaths. The existence of these facilities is based on the idea that drug addiction should be treated as a disease and not a criminal offense. Distributing clean needles is a highly controversial subject. Critics say that sites like this encourage and enable drug users; proponents argue that the drug use will take place anyway, so why not provide a safe place for addicts to get high. It should be noted that the facilities do not distribute drugs.

The Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre in the Kings Cross area of Australia is funded solely from monies confiscated from crime. The flow of drug users is single-flow, one way in and one way out.  According to their 2010 fact sheet, there has been an 80% reduction in the number of ambulance calls to the area since the facility has opened.

Drug policy is not often seen as a public health issue, and the war on drugs is usually a public safety issue. While supervised injection sites are unheard of in most places, needle exchange is much more common. You can find needle exchange programs in such American cities as San Francisco and New York City. In addition, California voters approved Proposition 36 (also known as Substance Abuse and Crime Prevention Act) in 2000, treatment instead of jail legislation. The legislation treats drug addiction as a health problem instead of solely a public safety issue.

Photo by Melissa