Pubdate: Mon, 27 Jul 2015
Source: Vancouver 24hours (CN BC)
Copyright: 2015 Vancouver 24 hrs.
Contact: http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/letters
Website: http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3837
Author: Brent Stafford
Note: Brent Stafford is a veteran television producer and marketing 
specialist. His company ShakyEgg.com works in the brand, 
entertainment and resource space.
Page: 6

The Duel

This Week's Topic: Are Safe Injection Sites Like Insite in 
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Good Public Policy?

HARM REDUCTION ALLOWS CYCLE OF MISERY TO REPEAT ITSELF

I have a lot of sympathy for injection drugs users. Addiction 
consumes mind, body and soul - without treatment, the disease gets 
progressively worse, leaving only incarceration or death. That is, 
unless you frequent Insite, the safe-injection site in Vancouver's 
Downtown Eastside. There, the mortal consequences of hardcore drug 
use are suspended..

At Insite, drug users can inject heroin (40% of injections), powder 
cocaine (30%) and methamphetamine (5%) - chasing the high all the way 
to the point of death, with no fear of paying the ultimate price.

An overdose is death in process - the user consumes more drug than 
the body can process and life-sustaining functions begin to halt. In 
the case of heroin, the person loses consciousness and the body 
forgets to breathe. Blood pressure can fall causing heart failure. 
Or, arrhythmia can stop the heart from pumping enough blood to the 
brain and other organs. The user is dying. Opioid overdoses are a 
regular occurrence at Insite. But death is denied its pleasure since 
facility staff members are at the ready to administer injections of 
naloxone hydrochloride to reverse the overdose. Brain damage can 
occur within only a few minutes as a result of lack of oxygen to the 
brain. So health-care workers hover and wait. I find this wretched 
and deplorable.

My Duel colleague says Insite provides the "lowest echelon of society 
a chance to overcome their demons." It does nothing of the sort. 
Insite states on its website that it strives to decrease adverse 
consequences of drug use "without requiring abstinence from drug use."

Don't let "harm reduction" advocates sway you with meaningless stats 
like a 35% drop in overdose deaths. That is only within a five-minute 
walk around Insite. What a pathetic measure of success against the 
massive problem of injection drug use.

There are an estimated 15,000 injections a day in the DTES and only 
600 of those happen at Insite - meaning we would need another 24 
facilities in the DTES to support the mall.

Sure, lives are saved, but to what end? The goal of an emergency 
overdose intervention is not to save a life in order to get that 
person into treatment and foster abstinence. No, it's merely to 
snatch the user from death's door. Dust them off and then allow the 
cycle to repeat. Insite only enables the continuation of human misery.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom