Pubdate: Sat, 01 Oct 2011 Source: Montreal Gazette (CN QU) Copyright: 2011 Canwest Publishing Inc. Contact: http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/letters.html Website: http://www.montrealgazette.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/274 Author: Jan Ravensbergen, The Gazette CLINIC IN MONTREAL'S DOWNTOWN CORE IN THE WORKS Legal Hurdle Out of the Way; Local Officials Have Developed Proposals, Now Need to Find Operating Funds Montreal's first supervised injection site for addicts who shoot up drugs intravenously could be established in the downtown core "sometime in 2012," Louis Letellier de StJust said after the Supreme Court of Canada handed down its landmark ruling on the subject Friday. With that last legal hurdle crossed, another obstacle remains - locking in the provincial health-care cash that would be required to run it, the chair of the board of directors of Cactus Montreal added. Since January, public health authorities and Montreal community organizations have been developing a total of "five or six proposals" - - Cactus included - for such safe-injection sites around the city, said Dr. Richard Lessard, who heads the Montreal Public Health Department. The junkie problem "exists openly in our community," he added, in alleys, parks and streets. A full report proposing how safe-injection sites "can be done right" in Montreal - in a way "acceptable to the population, efficient and affordable" - is likely to be made public in December, Lessard added. "You see the problems that people who have such addictions live with, the problems in the families and communities, the lack of economic productivity, all the health and social problems associated with that." Providing safe-injection sites and thus linking addicts into street-level networks that can encourage them to overcome their addictions, he said, "is also the right thing to do from a justice standpoint, a humanistic viewpoint - as well as for public health." An estimated 25,000 Montrealers inject illegal drugs intravenously, Letellier de StJust said. Lessard pegged the figure at "more like 15,000." Cactus opened North America's first needle exchange in Montreal in 1989. It gives away about 330,000 syringes a year, of the one million distributed annually to addicts across Montreal Island, including at most pharmacies. The proposed Cactus safe-injection site - junkies inject cocaine, heroin and a range of crushed and diluted prescription drugs - is among the more advanced of those under study, Lessard suggested. Cactus was an intervenor in the Supreme Court case. It has been developing its safe-injection operating plan since 2007, Letellier de St-Just said, and finalized it several weeks ago. It would be located at the group's Sanginet St. headquarters, near Ste. Catherine St. E., and open a month or two after an operating budget of "about $300,000 a year" could be obtained. It would provide "five or six cubicles" and require a medical staff of 3.5 nurses on a full-time-equivalent basis: "Most of the money would go for salaries." "We could go as high as 100 injections a day," Letellier de St-Just said - far smaller than some 800 a day at the Insite clinic, operating since 2003 in Vancouver. Given the nature of its vocation, Cactus operates a "Good Neighbours Committee" to deal with concerns expressed by area residents, merchants, police and others, he said. Funding for safe-injection clinics would come from the Quebec Health Department, which has said it was awaiting the court ruling. There are at least eight street-level needle-exchange sites operating in the city, Letellier de St-Just said, largely in the downtown and east end. Officials authorized to speak for several - including Spectre de rue, Dopamine and Plein-Milieu - weren't available for comment, although staff fielding those calls expressed delight with the development. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard R Smith Jr.