May 23, 2012

Should Toronto provide safe and supervised injection sites for addicts to use illicit drugs?

Against injection sites: Gwen Landolt, president of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada

Drug addicts deserve to be treated with dignity by being helped to stop their addiction. Shuffling them off to an injection site only deepens their addiction and hastens their inevitable and terrifying death.

It offers no hope of a normal life.

These sites do not “save lives and health” as claimed by their advocates. Canadian studies making this claim were done by the very same team that lobbied for the Vancouver drug injection site over a decade ago. Having a conflict of interest, they have published over two dozen studies, all indicating positive results for the injection site.

This result is contradicted both by a B.C. Coroners Services report and B.C. Vital Statistics report, which indicate that deaths by overdose have increased each year since the Vancouver injection site was opened in 2003.

The impartial federal government’s expert advisory committee concluded that the Vancouver site, which costs $3 million to operate annually, refers three per cent of its attendees for treatment.

If an injection site is established, the happiest people in Toronto will be the drug traffickers, whose business will boom with an increase in drug sales. The unhappiest individuals will be nearby residents, as well as the police, who will have to deal with the increase in crime due to the criminal activity caused by addicts. This is one of the reasons that Vancouver has one of the highest crime rates in North America.

A compassionate and humane solution for drug addicts is the Toronto Drug Court, which allows the addict to take treatment in lieu of the charges being pursued. Scarce public health resources should not be spent on Insite, but instead on the treatment centres, which offer a genuine escape for addicts f rom their addiction.

For injection sites: Peggy Millson, professor emeritus, University of Toronto

The poorest and most vulnerable people who inject addictive drugs are likely to do so in conditions that put them at risk for a wide variety of preventable illnesses. Some of these, such as HIV and hepatitis C, are associated with the sharing of needles and injection equipment and can be prevented by ensuring that sterile equipment is available when it is needed. Other conditions, such as abscesses and infections of the valves of the heart, happen because injecting is carried out in unsanitary conditions, such as stairwells and parks, and without access to clean water or a clean place to prepare an injection.

Injecting in public places usually means that people inject as quickly as possible, which may put them at more risk for overdosing. If they inject alone, they are in even more danger of dying from a drug overdose with no one able to respond.

People who are dealing with an addiction will inject whenever they are able to acquire the drugs they crave whether or not we provide a safe place. Providing a safer place to inject saves health care costs — each case of HIV, hepatitis C and other injection-related infections costs many thousands of dollars to treat. In addition, safer injection sites prevent transmission of serious chronic infectious diseases to others and save lives because a quick and expert response to an overdose is readily available. The sites also care for the health and well-being of these vulnerable citizens. This can begin to improve self-esteem and self-care even for addicted people who have given up on their own health.

Toronto is home to thousands of injection drug users who need such services. If we invest in effective services, like safe injection sites, we will be able to prevent drug overdose deaths and avoid huge costs for the treatment of infectious diseases into the future.

This article appears in the December 2011 issue of Post City Magazines

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