Pubdate: Thu, 11 Aug 2016
Source: Now, The (Surrey, CN BC)
Copyright: 2016 Canwest Publishing Inc.
Contact:  http://www.thenownewspaper.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1462
Author: Amy Reid

SURREY URGENTLY NEEDS A SUPERVISED INJECTION SITE - YESTERDAY

It's been more than a decade since North America's first legal
supervised injection site opened its doors on the Downtown East Side
and now debate is flying over whether Surrey should have its own.

It should.

Full stop.

With epidemic levels of overdoses, Fraser Health says they're putting
together an "aggressive" strategy to combat the issue - possibly such
a facility in Surrey.

On the weekend of July 15, Surrey Memorial Hospital saw 43 overdoses.
Since then? An average of three a day.

It's getting worse, officials say. Scary, considering the number of
people dying from overdoses was shocking even before the recent spike.
And Fraser Health says those overdosing are of all ages, and it's
affecting everyone from recreational users to full-blown addicts.

In the first half of 2016, 44 people died in Surrey of illicit drug
overdose. Province-wide, 371 people lost their lives - a 74 per cent
jump from the same period of 2015.

To put that into perspective, there have been seven homicides in
Surrey and another 13 people killed in traffic crashes (eight of those
pedestrians). Combined? It's still less than half of the number of
lives drugs have taken.

Something must be done.

The experts say it best, right?

Well, I'll let them make my point for me.

Doctors Julio Montaner and Thomas Kerr of the BC Centre for Excellence
in HIV/AIDS wrote a submission to the Vancouver Sun in 2013 about the
successful history of Insite, Vancouver's supervised injection site.

Here's what they had to say.

"A large body of scientific evidence shows that Insite is meeting its
objectives," the letter states. "Peer-reviewed studies involving
dozens of researchers from Canada, Australia, Britain and the U.S.
demonstrate clearly that Insite does not increase crime or perpetuate
active drug use. More than 30 peer-reviewed studies show that Insite
saves lives and health care dollars, reduces disease transmission and
promotes entry into addiction treatment."

The doctors also say, "The program now has the support of leading
national health organizations such as the Canadian Medical
Association, the Canadian Association of Nurses and the Canadian
Public Health Association."

Sounds pretty solid, right?

If you're not convinced yet, here's more.

A 2011 study published in the medical journal The Lancet received
recorded deaths and, using appropriate statistical methods, found
fatal overdoses within 500 metres of Insite decreased by 35 per cent
after the facility opened, compared to just a nine per cent decrease
in the rest of Vancouver.

Interestingly enough, safe injection services actually existed in
Vancouver before Insite - in a safe-injection room at the Dr. Peter
Centre a year before Insite opened in 2003.

The facility's executive director, Maxine Davis, said in a 2008
interview with Black Press that it didn't require a Section 56
exemption (like Insite did) because the centre's "harm reduction room"
is part of a larger spectrum of care under the "comfort care" model
developed by Dr. Peter Jepson-Young, a B.C. doctor famous for publicly
documenting his battle with AIDS in the early 1990s (and for whom the
centre is now named).

The centre, in a four-storey building behind St. Paul's Hospital, has
a day health program and a 24-hour care residence for people with
HIV/AIDS. Nurses also provide safe injection services for people in
their rooms who are in the 24-hour resident care program.

In fact, registered nurses were the first to suggest the provision of
safe-injection at the Dr. Peter Centre.

Davis told Black Press nurses came to her and said, "We think what we
are doing is unethical. We are giving people clean needles and sending
them outside to inject. Because of that, they risk overdosing and
dying, and what we observe as nurses is preventable infections: They
rush their injections outside in bushes, they don't want to be
embarrassed by people seeing them, they come back into the centre with
ripped veins and skin, and they end up with infections that are
preventable and they end up in hospital. As nurses, we find that
unacceptable when we know what we can do to prevent that."

Davis noted the single biggest contributing factor to the risk of
death by overdose is injecting alone.

Despite all this evidence, the critics are still out there. They
probably always will be. Some will always see this type of help as
enabling.

But what's the alternative?

More overdose deaths? More people contracting diseases that land them
in hospitals, ultimately costing horrendous amounts of dollars to the
public health system and, in the end, they die anyway?

Let's do what we can to prevent these diseases and save
lives.

Surrey Mayor Linda Hepner hasn't been convinced that such a facility
should be built in our city.

Here's hoping she can be.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Matt