Social Policy in Ontario

Keeping drug users safe helps the entire city

Posted on March 15, 2016 in Child & Family Policy Context

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TheStar.com – Opinion/Editorials – Toronto medical officer of health Dr. David McKeown is right to push for supervised drug injection sites. They will save lives and improve neighbourhoods.
Mar 14 2016.   Editorial

The evidence is in: supervised sites allowing users to inject illegal drugs save lives. But they do much more than that.

Providing a secure place for people to use heroin and other injection drugs leads to cleaner, safer neighbourhoods. It boosts overall public health by reducing the spread of blood-borne infections, such as HIV and hepatitis C. And it saves money by lowering the huge cost associated with treating such conditions.

In short, there’s every reason to proceed with a plan to open three supervised injection sites in Toronto.

“Injection drug users are at exceptionally high risk,” Dr. David McKeown, the city’s medical officer of health, told the Star’s editorial board on Monday. “This program helps keep them alive long enough to get off drugs.”
McKeown is seeking approval for community consultations to create a site in the Queen West area, another in South Riverdale and a third in the city’s centre, near Dundas Square. His initiative deserves strong support from Toronto board of health when it meets next Monday.

The obvious — and most compelling — reason to proceed is to ease a rising tide of accidental overdose deaths. “Preventing overdose must be the top public health priority of our city,” says Councillor Joe Cressy, chair of the Toronto Drug Strategy Implementation Panel. “We have an opportunity to prevent unnecessary loss of life.”

The numbers are indeed stark. Overdose deaths in Toronto increased by 41 per cent between 2004, when 146 people died, and 2013, when there where 206 such fatalities. But these figures, the most recent available, include death by suicide. Setting aside cases where people intentionally killed themselves, an even more disturbing jump in overdose fatalities emerges.

Deaths from accidental overdose are up by more than 80 per cent, going from 82 in 2004 to 149 fatalities in 2013. That’s almost three people dying every week in this city from a cause that is largely preventable.

Supervised injection sites help reduce this toll by giving people a clean place to inject their drug, using sterile needles, without fear of arrest. Oversight is provided by trained nurses able to respond quickly to an overdose by administering a dose of naloxone, which works as an antidote to excess opioids in a person’s system.

It’s not hard to see how this saves lives, said McKeown. “Injection under the supervision of a health professional is safer than injecting in a washroom or alley.”

It’s better for the community, too. As many as one-third of people injecting illegal drugs do so in public places. Supervised sites “move drug use and needles from our streets, our parks, our backyards and our coffee shops,” said Cressy.

A further benefit is that staff at a supervised site are better placed to reach out to drug users, putting them in contact with counseling and rehabilitation programs as well as other health and social services.

The city’s strategy of placing supervised injection sites in existing facilities, where people already receive “harm reduction” services, makes eminent sense. About 1.9 million clean needles are distributed to injection drug users in Toronto each year, and 75 per cent of them are delivered through the three centres where the proposed new sites are to be set up. “That’s where the drug use is,” says Cressy,

Supervised injection sites typically generate community opposition, but it’s important to remember that people in the habit of taking illegal drugs, especially those who are addicted, aren’t going away. If they are denied a safe, supervised place to inject the drug of their choice they’ll keep doing what they do now — shooting up in neighbourhood parks, washrooms, stairwells and alleys.

They destroy their own health in doing so, and also put others at risk through the used needles they leave scattered in public places.

There is a better way. The first supervised injection site opened in Bern, Switzerland, 30 years ago. More than 90 are operating successfully in countries including Germany, Spain, Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands and Australia. Vancouver now has two such centres.

Earlier attempts in Toronto to follow the example of these progressive jurisdictions ran up against opposition from the Harper government. The new Liberal government has signaled it will not block new injection sites, so it’s time for Toronto to move ahead. It’s best for injection drug users, and for the city at large.

< http://www.thestar.com/opinion/editorials/2016/03/14/keeping-drug-users-safe-helps-the-entire-city-editorial.html >

Tags: crime prevention, disabilities, Health, ideology, mental Health, pharmaceutical, standard of living

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