Vancouver Safe-Injection Site Can Operate Until June Under Six-Month Extension
Posted on: Tuesday, 2 October 2007, 15:00 CDT
By THE CANADIAN PRESS
VANCOUVER - Ottawa has given Vancouver's safe injection site another six-month reprieve, meaning the facility can operate until next June.
"This extension will allow research on how supervised injection sites affect prevention, treatment and crime to be continued," the federal Health Department said in a two-paragraph news release Tuesday.
In order to operate, the facility needs an exemption from federal drug laws, but the exemption was set to expire in December.
The facility opened with federal and provincial approval in 2003 and allows drug users to inject their own drugs under the supervision of a nurse.
The aim is to reduce the harm connected to illegal drug use.
The Conservative government has been cool to the project, though Premier Gordon Campbell said as late as Monday that he supports it.
Those who run the site announced in August the site will soon expand to include detox beds and short-term housing on the facility's second floor.
The site, called Insite, operates in Vancouver's impoverished Downtown Eastside and proponents say it has saved dozens of lives.
In August, a group of 130 prominent doctors, scientists and public health professionals accused the federal government of putting political ideology ahead of scientific evidence when considering the future of Vancouver's safe injection site.
The group, which included British Columbia's chief medical officer of health, the head of the British Columbia Centre for Disease Control and Montreal's director of public health, endorsed a commentary published in the journal Open Medicine that said the injection site was being judged by a different standard than other health measures.
"The health of the nation is placed in peril if our leaders ignore crucial research findings simply because they run contrary to a rigid policy agenda driven by ideology or fixed beliefs," stated the article, written by Dr. Stephen Hwang, a Toronto researcher on inner city health.
Proponents of the continuation of the program point to the roughly 25 positive studies on Insite that have been published in the leading medical journals of the world - the New England Medical Journal, the Lancet, the British Medical Journal, Addiction and the Canadian Medical Association Journal.
One of those studies, published in May, showed that drug addicts who visit the injection site were more likely to enrol in detox programs, more likely to start methadone replacement programs and reduce their number of monthly visits to shoot up.
But Clement has insisted not all the research has been positive, though he didn't specify what research he was referring to.
Source: Canadian Press
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