Drug addicts’ lives really matter to me

Re: Why safe injections sites won’t cut it, Aug. 9.

Margret Kopala provided a litany of reasons why Ottawa should eschew a safe injection site. However, she failed to mention that safe injection sites save lives. She points out that overdose deaths have increased since Insite, the Vancouver safe injection site, opened in 2003. She fails to mention, as the study by the prestigious medical journal Lancet stressed, that overdose deaths around Insite have declined 35 per cent in this time frame.

There have been more than three million visits to Insite since 2003, yet not a single overdose death at the facility. Safe injection sites save lives. Every addict’s life matters to me. I realize that view isn’t universal.

Ken Armstrong, Ottawa