As more North American cities push for supervised injection sites to address soaring fatal overdose rates, they can find a dozen years of lessons in Vancouver, which has the only such facilities on the continent.
Health officials in several Canadian cities – including Montreal, Victoria and, most recently, Toronto – are somewhere along the path to opening their own supervised injection sites, emboldened by a Supreme Court of Canada ruling and the election last year of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberals.
As local, provincial and federal governments weigh new proposals in those cities and elsewhere, Vancouver’s health agencies, experts, drug advocates and police say they should look to the West Coast city’s experience as a model for what works.
Vancouver is currently home to the only two legally sanctioned supervised injection sites in North America.
The most well known is Insite, a detached facility located in the heart of the city’s impoverished Downtown Eastside, which opened in 2003. Lesser known is the Dr. Peter Centre, a renowned HIV/AIDS centre in the city’s West End, which has offered clients a small-scale version of the service as part of an integrated model since 2002. The Dr. Peter Centre’s site was officially approved by the federal government earlier this year.
Proponents note that supervised-injection service saves lives, while also serving as a gateway to further health care, and they point to several academic studies that have found the facility reduces overdose deaths and the transmission of blood-borne illnesses while reducing open-air drug use.
At Insite, users first sign in and tell staff which drug they are planning to inject. This data are used for several purposes, including monitoring of particularly toxic drugs to hit the area and long-term drug trends. Users are then provided with sterile supplies, including syringes, water, alcohol swabs and tourniquets, which they then take to one of the facility’s 13 injection booths. In the event of an overdose, a nurse intervenes immediately.