Health crisis brewing in Vancouver before safe injection site opened: lawyer
VANCOUVER — A lawyer for a group that wants the federal government to keep a safe-injection site open in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside says a public health crisis was brewing in the area for more than a decade before the facility opened.
Monique Pongracic-Speier told B.C. Supreme Court on Tuesday that injection drug use had become an epidemic in Canada's poorest postal code and the site now provides an important health service.
"I think it would be fair to say that the Downtown Eastside has the largest open drug scene in Canada, if not North America," she said.
Pongracic-Speier represents the Portland Hotel Society, which co-manages the site. She said the facility is part of the city's overall harm-reduction strategy.
"It has been normalized to be a necessary part of the health-care services in the area," she said of the site, called Insite.
North America's only such facility opened in 2003 and allows people to inject their own illegal drugs, including heroin and cocaine, under the supervision of a nurse.
But Insite needs an exemption from Canada's drug laws to operate.
The exemption runs out at the end of June and the Portland Hotel Society and a group representing Vancouver drug addicts are in court to argue that the federal government has no jurisdiction over the site.
They say that because Insite provides a health service, it is under the jurisdiction of the provincial government, which pays for it and has already said the site should not close.
Pongracic-Speier said a 1995 report by Vancouver's chief coroner said 331 British Columbia injection drug users died from overdosing in 1993, mostly in the Downtown Eastside, compared to 39 deaths in 1988.
In 1996, a report by Vancouver's medical health officer said injection drug use was responsible for a steep rise in HIV rates, skin and blood-borne infections such as HIV and hepatitis and that health-care resources were stretched as a result.
By the following year, Pongracic-Speier said, 27 per cent of Downtown Eastside residents had HIV, with researchers calling that an epidemic. It prompted the province to spend $3 million on a program to combat the infection.
She said many of the drug addicts in the Downtown Eastside are First Nations who are vulnerable to the dealers who frequent the area.
Many addicts also lack adequate housing and are infected with HIV, hepatitis C and tuberculosis and may also have a mental illness, Pongracic-Speier said.
An affidavit by Heather Hay, director of Addictions, HIV-AIDS and Aboriginal Services for the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, said people who don't live in the Downtown Eastside are also vulnerable to infectious diseases such as hepatitis A and B as a result of inadequate access to washrooms.
Hay said in the affidavit that it's not uncommon for 80 to 90 people in some of the Downtown Eastside hotels to share one washroom.
Pongracic-Speier said that in response to the crisis in the area, more needle exchange programs have been set up, new health clinics have opened and an existing clinic has expanded its hours to accommodate up to 11,000 people a month.
She said the role of Insite is not just to save lives by reducing overdose deaths but to also refer clients to addiction treatment facilities.
Since last year, the facility has added a detox-on-demand centre upstairs so people who want to get off drugs can enter the program immediately instead of having to wait.
The second floor of the Insite building also includes alcohol and drug-free housing, which people can use after detoxing and while they're waiting for long-term housing.
Along with the B.C. government, Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan and the Vancouver Police Department also endorse Insite.
