Across North America, tainted opioids are killing people who use drugs. Vancouver’s Mark Tyndall says we should start dispensing safer pills using high-tech machines.
Blue tarps and shabby tents with people sleeping in them line our route in the Downtown Eastside, where the wail of an ambulance siren is always around the corner. We see handwritten signs taped up in the back alleys, warning “Danger: Green Heroin. Use ¼ usual dose.”
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From the outset, Insite was as much a public health intervention as it was a scientific experiment. The Canadian government granted the nonprofit a temporary exemption from the country’s Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, while researchers studied the program’s effects. Tyndall, who was working at the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS at the time, was one of the lead investigators on the project.
In the earliest days, he and his co-investigators were wary of overwhelming Insite’s participants with lengthy surveys and probing questions. So they started off small, assigning research assistants to simply sit across the street and count the number of people walking in the door. Gradually, though, their research expanded. And the results were profoundly counterintuitive or at least inconsistent with conventional wisdom.