The Vancouver politician who championed supervised injection sites in that city says Mayor Jim Watson should try to understand drug addicts before rejecting a plan that would keep more of them alive. "I just get annoyed at politicians who don't go out into the field and talk to the participants and find out what's really going on," former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen said in an interview with Postmedia. "You can't always rely on reports from your staff." Watson attends hundreds of community events each year, but Sean LeBlanc, chair of the Drug Users Advocacy League of Ottawa, said the mayor has yet to accept one of his invitations. "We have invited Mr. Watson to several events over several different years. He has attended none of them," said LeBlanc. [continues 651 words]
Ex-Vncouver Mayor Pans Ottawa Boss Over Safe-injection Sites The politician who championed supervised injection sites in Vancouver says Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson should try to understand drug addicts before rejecting a plan that would keep more of them alive. "I just get annoyed at politicians who don't go out into the field and talk to the participants and find out what's really going on," former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen told Postmedia. "You can't always rely on reports from your staff." [continues 431 words]
Saskatoon Tribal Council wants to study establishing a location in city The chief of the Saskatoon Tribal Council wants to investigate the merits of a safe injection site in the city. "We haven't determined whether or not there should be one here yet. My standpoint is we need to look at the facts and the data and make an informed decision," Felix Thomas said. The new Liberal federal government appears more friendly to the concept than its Conservative predecessor - last month, Health Canada granted a four-year exemption from federal drug laws for Vancouver's Insite. [continues 585 words]
She'll take the message to the UN ... An Edmonton mother is part of a Canadian contingent attending a global drug policy summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York next week to urge governments to forego the "war on drugs" and embrace harm reduction. The harm reduction approach promotes policies and programs that support and reduce the risks and dangers drug users face, rather than prohibiting the drug itself and punishing users. Lorna Thomas's 24-year-old son, Alex Thomas-Haug, died by suicide in 2012. Thomas-Haug was a welder and snowboarder who suffered from depression. His mother later found out he'd also been using cocaine. [continues 467 words]
The most dangerous consequences of narcotics largely stem from their criminalization, yet we continue to try to control supply Canada is in the midst of a fentanyl crisis. Actually, fentanyl is just the latest drug to take centre stage in a seemingly never-ending string of crises featuring the "fill-in-theblank" drug du jour: opium, cocaine, heroin, crack, OxyContin, heroin again and now fentanyl. What's next? The word on the street is that W-18, a drug 100 times more potent than fentanyl, is displacing it. [continues 806 words]
An Edmonton mother is part of a Canadian contingent attending a global drug policy summit at the United Nations headquarters in New York next week to urge governments to forego the "war on drugs" and embrace harm reduction. The harm reduction approach promotes policies and programs that support and reduce the risks and dangers drug users face, rather than prohibiting the drug itself and punishing users. Lorna Thomas's 24-year-old son, Alex Thomas-Haug, died by suicide in 2012. Thomas-Haug was a welder and snowboarder who suffered from depression. His mother later found out he'd also been using cocaine. [continues 412 words]
Addiction Treatment Agencies Say It's Needed A coalition of addiction treatment agencies has unanimously endorsed the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre's plan to open a supervised injection site in downtown Ottawa. "There is clear evidence of need for supervised injection services in Ottawa," Lise Girard, chair of the Champlain Addiction Co-ordinating Body, wrote in a letter of support obtained by Postmedia. The co-ordinating body represents 20 government-funded agencies in the region that offer drug and alcohol treatment programs. [continues 417 words]
Those in the Field Say Such a Facility Would Be First Step in Treatment A coalition of addiction treatment agencies has unanimously endorsed the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre's plan to open a supervised injection site in downtown Ottawa. "There is clear evidence of need for supervised injection services in Ottawa," Lise Girard, chair of the Champlain Addiction Co-ordinating Body, wrote in a letter of support obtained by Postmedia. The co-ordinating body represents 20 government-funded agencies in the region that offer drug and alcohol treatment programs. [continues 567 words]
Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins has suggested he will only consider funding a safe injection site for Ottawa if the project has municipal approval. In a statement issued to Postmedia, Hoskins said decisions about safe injection sites rest mostly with federal and municipal governments. "I understand that such a proposal is currently being considered by the City of Ottawa," he said. "Our government has been clear that we will consider a request for a safe injection site if a municipality were to come forward with a proposal." Asked to clarify whether the province would consider a proposal that came directly from a health centre, not a municipality, an official in Hoskins's office said, "We're not going to prejudge the outcomes of the municipal process." [continues 526 words]
A lawmaker from Stockton wants California to take a radical approach to prevent overdose deaths: Give users a clean place and medical supervision to shoot up. Democratic Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman has introduced a bill that would allow local health departments such as the OC Health Care Agency to set up "supervised consumption services" in their communities, typically places where people bring in drugs they bought on the streets and safely ride out their high while monitored by nurses. "I know when you first hear about it, it's like, 'What? You're condoning drug use.' No, we're acknowledging people are dying on the streets," Eggman said Tuesday at the Assembly's public safety committee hearing in Sacramento. "In the U.S., we have chosen to treat addiction from a criminal perspective. It's high time we start treating it like a public health issue." [continues 533 words]
Lawmaker's Proposal Comes As S.F., Other Cities Weigh Sites SACRAMENTO (AP) - A lawmaker wants to allow California addicts to use heroin, crack and other drugs at supervised facilities to cut down on overdoses, joining several U.S. cities considering establishing the nation's first legal drug-injection sites. The proposal introduced Tuesday comes as San Francisco, Seattle, New York City and Ithaca, New York, weigh ordinances to set up the facilities, citing the success of a site operating in Canada since 2003. [continues 158 words]
Melting snow brings out the natural beauty of a community, unfortunately it also brings into sight garbage which was previously hidden underneath the snow. Among the garbage can be discarded needles, which Kenora residents have been reporting, mainly through social media, that they have found at various places, including Anicinable Park. The Northwestern Health Unit's needle exchange program, which is part of its Harm Reduction Program services, has been blamed as the source of these needles. Gillian Lunny, manager of the health unit's harm reduction program, said she cannot confirm whether the number of needles being found around Kenora in the spring of 2016 is higher or lower than in previous years. [continues 696 words]
A new Mainstreet/Postmedia poll says 44 per cent of Edmontonians surveyed support the establishment of a safe injection site for IV drug users in this city. Another 30 per cent opposed the idea, while 26 per cent were undecided. That's not overwhelming public support. But it suggests an intriguing degree of public receptiveness. And this is the right time for us to be having that discussion. Historically, heroin hasn't been a problem drug in Edmonton. But that's changing. In 2013, there were 19 visits to emergency rooms in the Edmonton health zone because of heroin overdoses. Last year, there were 118. In the first two months of 2016, there were about as many heroin overdoses as there were in all of 2013. [continues 625 words]
Bid will go ahead even without local officials' blessing, health centre says Officials at the Sandy Hill Community Health Centre intend to pursue their plan to open a safe-injection service in downtown Ottawa even if the proposal is ultimately rejected by city council. "We are very open to continuing the dialogue locally with city council or the board of health, but if local officials can't or won't provide letters of support for us, we just have to accept that and move on," health centre executive Rob Boyd told reporters Monday. [continues 362 words]
The idea of a supervised-injection site in Edmonton appears to have lukewarm support among city residents, a new poll has found. One of the researchers assembling a proposal for medically supervised injection services in the city said Sunday she hopes support will grow once people find out more about how the service would work. "We're helping people stay alive, and also helping them find an off-ramp from using injection drugs," said Elaine Hyshka, a University of Alberta public health researcher and core member of Access to Medically Supervised Injection Services Edmonton. [continues 414 words]
Safety Push Local officials are showing interest in making Seattle the first U.S. city to offer a medically supervised site for drug use, which advocates say could reduce overdose deaths, disease transmission and discarded needles on the ground. Seattle could become the first city in the U.S. with a public site where users can inject and smoke hard drugs under medical supervision. One local group plans to open a bare-bones safe-consumption site on a shoestring budget as soon as possible, while another group has launched an awareness campaign to build support among politicians and communities. [continues 1238 words]
The year 2008 was momentous. Lehman Brothers collapsed, Radovan Karad i was arrested, Russian troops massed on the Georgian border, and Barack Obama beat John McCain to the White House. But 2008 was also significant for something that didn't happen. It was the year that the world didn't eliminate the illicit drugs problem. This quixotic goal had been set a decade earlier at a United Nations general assembly special session when, under the vainglorious slogan "We can do it", the supranational body pledged that, by 2008, the world would be "drug free". [continues 2177 words]
Dave Pineau Is an Addict and Advocate for Harm Reduction, Andrew Duffy Writes. As Dave Pineau's injection drug use snowballed in the early 1980s, harm reduction amounted to a matchbox and a bottle of Aqua Velva. Pineau regularly shared needles with four members of a close-knit group of friends, all of them homeless on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. The men were partial to cocaine and speed, a powerful amphetamine that jacks up the central nervous system. They'd mix the drugs with water, draw the solution into a needle, and slam it into their veins. [continues 2387 words]
Experts Urge Reversal of Policies That Have Driven Violence and Deaths An international commission of medical experts is calling for global drug decriminalisation, arguing that current policies lead to violence, deaths and the spread of disease, harming health and human rights. The commission, set up by the Lancet medical journal and Johns Hopkins University in the US, finds that tough drugs laws have caused misery, failed to curb drug use, fuelled violent crime and spread the epidemics of HIV and hepatitis C through unsafe injecting. Publishing its report on the eve of a special session of the United Nations devoted to illegal narcotics, it urges a reversal of the repressive policies imposed by most governments. [continues 709 words]
To the Editor: Re "Town's Anti-Drug Plan: Safe Site to Use Heroin" (front page, March 23), about a proposal by the mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., to establish the first site in the United States where people could legally inject heroin: Supervised injection facilities, or SIFs, are a longstanding public health tool in several countries and are rapidly gaining support elsewhere, including in the United States. Advocates like me understand why people have questions about something that at first pass looks as if it enables destructive behavior. [continues 117 words]
