Former drug user, health centres speak in favour of safer sites
Ray Harrison has seen people shoot up using water from toilets and puddles.
He’s pulled friends who were overdosing in the street to a phone booth to call 911, so they wouldn’t be tracked by police.
Now Harrison – a former drug user himself who says he’s been clean since the New Year’s Day 2014 – says it’s time for Ottawa to open a supervised injection site.
He believes they will help prevent people from spreading disease and give them a reason to access health care services, which could start them on a road to breaking their addictions.
“You need to be able to start somewhere and not necessarily when you hit rock bottom, when you get incarcerated,” Harrison told CBC News ahead of tonight’s Ottawa Board of Health meeting.
The city’s medical officer of health, Dr. Isra Levy, is expected to make his case at that meeting for why Ottawa should have supervised injection sites, and why Ottawa Public Health should support agencies that propose to set them up.
Community health centres will be at tonight’s Ottawa Board of Health meeting to offer Levy their full support, and Harrison is planning to be there, too.
“I think the safer injection site will save a lot of people, and the community, a lot of grief; along with the police [since] they’re not having to chase these people down in somebody’s backyard,” Harrison said.
‘The time is definitely now’
For many years Canadians heard only about the contentious Insite program in Vancouver.
That facility, which opened in 2003, has long been the only supervised injection site in the country – but as Levy notes in his report, a 2011 Supreme Court decision that granted Insite an exemption so its clients would not be charged for possessing illegal drugs has had a major impact across the country.