Pubdate: Tue, 13 Dec 2016
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.ottawacitizen.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Andrew Duffy
Page: A1

SUPERVISED INJECTION SITE SEEKS $1.4M

We need to take swift action on the opioid crisis to save
lives.

The Sandy Hill Community Health Centre has asked the province for $1.4
million a year to operate a supervised injection site seven days a
week, 12 hours a day in downtown Ottawa.

The estimated cost has more than quadrupled since a plan for the
service was unveiled earlier this year.

Rob Boyd, director of the health centre's harm reduction program, said
costs have gone up as the service model changed in response to the
public's feedback - and to the quickening pace of the opioid epidemic.
Community members, he said, made it clear they want drug users to be
able to access the centre's medical, social and counselling services
whenever they visit the injection site.

"They felt we needed to be open as many hours as possible: that this
was not going to be a Monday to Friday, nine to five service," he
said. "What that does is scale up the cost of doing this."

Boyd made the comments as federal Health Minister Jane Philpott
announced Friday that the Liberal government will be making it easier
for local agencies to open supervised injection sites in Canada.
Philpott said the government will introduce legislation to streamline
the current approvals process: agencies will have to meet five
criteria to open a new supervised site instead of 26.

Naini Cloutier, executive director of the Somerset West Community
Health Centre, welcomed the changes. "This is a very good news because
it will certainly help us move faster," she said.

The Somerset West health centre wants to open a supervised injection
site that can accommodate four or five drug users at a time. The
project remains in its planning stages, Cloutier said, with public
consultations expected in April.

Rob Boyd said the new legislation comes too late for the Sandy Hill
proposal. The centre is now finalizing its application based on the
onerous 2015 system introduced by the former Conservative government,
which passed the Respect For Communities Act after it lost a court bid
to shutter the Vancouver safe injection site, Insite.

Boyd said he expects to submit a licence application to Health Canada
by the end of the year; he wants to open the supervised injection site
in the spring.

The health centre wants to accommodate up to six injection drug users
at its current facility, but it needs an exemption from the Controlled
Drugs and Substances Act to operate the service.

Under the existing process, the centre must prove that the service is
needed, and submit opinion letters from the mayor, the police chief,
the medical officer of health, and four other officials.

Boyd said the centre is almost finished that work. "We've been working
on this a very long time now," he said.

Earlier this year, Ontario Health Minister Eric Hoskins suggested that
Ottawa's city council will have to vote for a supervised drug
injection site before the province funds it. But Boyd argued that
municipal approval is an unnecessary step, particularly with powdered
fentanyl already on the streets of Ottawa, and carfentanil - another
dangerous opioid - likely on the way.

"We really can't get opened fast enough in order to prevent a number
of deaths," he warned. It's too late to save the hundreds of Canadians
who've already died this year from drug overdoses, but the Liberals'
proposed changes, which would make it easier to open safe-injection
sites, will help cities come to grips with a crisis that's cutting a
tragic swath across the country. Absent full drug legalization (and
the better health oversight it brings), the best we can do is try to
minimize the harm of drug use.

"We need to take swift action on the opioid crisis to save lives,"
said Health Minister Jane Philpott, having waited a year into her
mandate to make it easier to open safe-injection sites.

The Liberals have proposed a five-step plan that, while repealing the
more than two dozen steps needed to open a safe-injection site, still
maintains some troublesome elements from the last government's policy,
such as having to prove the need for a site (why wait for the body
count to climb?) and gathering evidence about the effect on crime
(rates haven't gone up around injection sites already open).

More than 600 people have died in British Columbia from overdoses this
year. Last week, Ottawa paramedics were reminded to wear gloves and
masks just in case they come into contact with the powerful drug
carfentanil.

About 40 people die of overdoses each year in Ottawa. The paramedics
don't have precise numbers on overdose deaths this year, but in the
first six months of 2016 they used naloxone, which can block an opioid
overdose, 56 times. In 2015, they used it 61 times in the entire year.

Better than having naloxone handy, users could take their drugs at a
safe-injection site, where there are trained staff to deal with
overdoses. Plus, there are the advantages of accessing clean needles,
and it's secure compared to using on the street. At Insite, one of two
such sites in Vancouver, there were around 1,400 overdoses between
2004 and 2010. None led to death.

The truth, backed by proper, peer-reviewed research, is that
safe-injection sites save lives, no matter how squeamish they make
homeowners, cops and politicians. Mayor Jim Watson, police Chief
Charles Bordeleau and police union boss Matt Skof have all, over the
years, been impudently and dangerously opposed, though Watson has
given himself a bit of political wiggle room on this topic.

The opposition is the absolute worst kind of NIMBYism, in which people
value their own comfort and treasure their own biases and electability
over the lives of the perhaps 5,600 injection drug users in town.

Yet, Ottawa's well on its way to getting its own site. The Sandy Hill
Community Health Centre, on Nelson Street, held public consultations
in April, and is aiming for a spring 2017 opening. It's been working
its way through the bog of regulations created by the Conservatives
with the funny-if-it-weren't-so-Orwellian Respect for Communities Act,
which finally passed in 2015, and which made opening a site hugely
daunting. Rob Boyd, the executive director of the Oasis drug treatment
program at the health centre, figures more than one site will be
necessary for drug users in different parts of the city, and said the
Liberals' changes should help the next proposal that comes along.

The most onerous regulation, Boyd explained, was gathering the
evidence that a site is needed. "They've been clearly demonstrated and
there's no need for every community to have to basically write the
same report."

This crisis exists at least partially because governments continue to
criminalize drug use, meaning an unregulated and dangerous black
market supplies drugs that can be unsafe. The Liberals will get plenty
of congratulations for their proposed injection-site changes and will
as well once marijuana is legalized. A report from the task force on
pot legalization is expected Tuesday.

There's little doubt, though, that the politicians haven't yet arrived
on scene with the guts to do what'll make the biggest difference of
all: Legalize all drugs.
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MAP posted-by: Matt