Pubdate: Mon, 18 Jul 2016
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Page: S1
Copyright: 2016 The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.theglobeandmail.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168
Author: Andrea Woo
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites)

ITHACA MAYOR TALKS DRUG STRATEGY, SUPERVISED-INJECTION SITES

Svante Myrick, the young mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., made international 
headlines earlier this year when he backed a drug strategy that 
included the opening of a supervised-injection site. While two such 
facilities have existed in Vancouver for more than 13 years - and 
Toronto recently approved three - supervised consumption remains a 
controversial idea for many in North America. If approved, Ithaca's 
could be the first of its kind in the United States.

The Globe and Mail spoke with Mr. Myrick, who recently visited 
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, where he toured the Insite 
supervised-injection site; the Providence Crosstown Clinic, where 
drug users who were part of a clinical trial receive prescription 
heroin; and other social-service providers.

Tell me about the drug situation in Ithaca.

It's similar to the rest of the States in that we're losing a lot of 
people to overdose. It's a small city - a city of about 30,000 - and 
we lose about one person a month to overdose. If you were to compare 
it to [Vancouver's] Downtown Eastside, or the Bronx, it's not the 
heroin capital of America, or even New York state. Ithaca's a quaint 
town, a college town, fairly prosperous. We have the lowest 
unemployment rate in New York state. But this is the face of drug 
use. Drug use is everywhere. We've got drug use in our classrooms, in 
our board rooms and we have on street users - the sort of folks who 
would really benefit from supervised injection.

You convened a drug policy committee comprising law enforcement, 
health officials, academics and others, which came up with a plan 
rooted in public health and harm-reduction principles. I heard you 
were surprised by some of their proposals.

Yeah, supervised injection was one of them. It came up right away. I 
asked them to write out on this board every resource that was 
available, and every resource that they had heard about and thought 
that Ithaca needed but wasn't currently available. Seven different 
people, out of 40, wrote "supervised injection" down. That was, 
honestly, the first time I had heard about it.

I wasn't even aware of the concept. I was barely aware of harm 
reduction as a useful alternative to the punitive war on drugs. Over 
two years, I learned more and became convinced it was a good idea. 
When they showed me the final recommendations and supervised 
injection was in there, I didn't fight it. I said, "This makes sense. 
I will go out there and defend it."

Tell me about your visit to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

It was great. It's a beautiful city. Everyone was very hospitable, 
from the users I spoke to, to the Vancouver police officers who 
showed us around a little bit. Liz Evans, formerly of the Portland 
Hotel Society, gave us a great tour. We saw the Drug Users Resource 
Centre (DURC), a couple of different housing projects, a couple of 
[single-room occupancy] hotels. We stopped at the Providence 
Crosstown Clinic and Insite. I was moved by this approach, which so 
obviously values people who are down and out. There's nothing 
glamorous about living on the street, about using five times a day. 
The people who worked at DURC, at Crosstown, at Insite, didn't 
sugarcoat it, but they treated them as people, nonetheless. They had 
a very straightforward integrity to all the interactions that I witnessed.

Did you find anything you saw to be surprising, or unexpected?

I think how maintained the drug use and the drug sales in the 
Downtown Eastside are. In Ithaca, the on-street drug use and drug 
dealing sort of bleeds everywhere. I don't know if it's because there 
are so many resources in that area that the folks who use and deal 
just stay there, but you could cross the street [into Gastown] and be 
like, "What just happened? I thought we were here to explore open-air 
drug use." I think that struck all of us from the States.

What kind of questions did you have at Insite and Crosstown?

Many of our questions were logistical: Do you have time limits for 
your users? How do you sign people in? How do you screen people and 
make sure they're healthy enough, sober enough, to [receive 
prescription heroin] at Crosstown? So a lot of questions about how 
this would work in action, in part because we weren't looking to be 
convinced it's a good idea - we're pretty convinced it's a good idea 
- - we just wanted tips on how to make sure that ours was successful 
when we got it up and running.

I think [heroin-assisted treatment at Crosstown] really impressed our 
police chief [John Barber]. He walked out of Crosstown thinking it 
was so orderly, so regimented, so structured. It seemed like a doctor's office.

- ---

This interview has been edited and condensed.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom