Insite's Future Still Undecided

Insite, the only safe-injection site in North America is located in Vancouver, British Columbia's gritty downtown eastside, where residents, businesses and drug addicts struggle to live side-by-side, and where, on any given day or night, the alley-ways are strewn with dirty needles, human excrement, garbage and the homeless.

These people, many of them long time drug addicts, do not deserve to be forgotten or tossed aside by an unforgiving society. Some of the other reasons why Insite should be allowed to continue operating outside of the Canada Narcotics Act include:

• 607 people a day use the Insite facility -- (that's 607 less dirty needles on the streets)
• Reduced syringe sharing
• Decline in car thefts and break-ins in the immediate area
• Increase in registration to detox centers (33% within the first six months of Insite opening)
• Decrease in needles littering the neighbourhood's alleys, streets, gardens, bathrooms, doorways and driveways
• Increase in education for drug-users around AIDS/HIV
• Zero Increase in drug related assaults and robberies

Yet, in spite of this, there are people who want to see Insite closed down. They question whether it is morally and ethically right to allow a safe-injection site in a downtown location, especially when injecting street drugs in Canada is illegal.

They fear that a clean, safe place available for addicts to inject drugs will encourage first-time users, in spite of studies proving the opposite, like the one conducted by the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS that shows the average client to have been using for fifteen years.

Perhaps, most of all, they fear what they don't know, but what should seem obvious: people don't want to become drug addicts, anymore than they aspire to be homelessness, or mentally ill, or alcoholic or sex-trade workers. Once they have reached a point in their lives where they are drug-addicted, it is useless to condemn them and humane to help them.

The future of Insite lies in the hands of the Federal Government of Canada. Unless Steven Harper agrees to extend it licence, Insite will be forced to close down on September 12, 2006.

I hope this doesn't happen. Vancouver's Mayor, Sam Sullivan is one of Canada's many civic, provincial and national politicians who support Insite and the concept behind it. In his own words: "I hope we can continue to provide a much needed intervention for a highly marginalized and vulnerable population of injection drug users."

And in my mind, isn't protecting those who can't protect themselves the morally and ethically correct action to take?

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