Vancouver OD prevention site records 108,800 visits, no deaths

Since its humble beginnings last year as a tiny tent in a Vancouver alley, where volunteers trained in overdose reversal would monitor people using drugs, the Overdose Prevention Society has hosted more than 100,000 visits without a single death.

Between Dec. 25, 2016 and Oct. 9 this year, there were 108,804 visits to the site behind 62 East Hastings St., according to data collected by the society and recently analyzed by Pivot Legal Society’s Peter Kim. A total of 255 overdoses were recorded at the site and none were fatal.

“The death toll would be way worse if we didn’t have these sites here,” Overdose Prevention Society co-founder Sarah Blyth said Thursday.

Blyth said those data prove that the site — where volunteers use their training, naloxone and oxygen to reverse overdoses — has filled a gap during a devastating illicit-drug overdose crisis that left more than 1,208 people dead in the first 10 months of 2017, according to a recent B.C. Coroners Service report.

Volunteers have hosted an average of 379 daily visits at the site, which had 721 visits on its busiest day, June 7.

Blyth opened the site in September 2016 with Downtown Eastside organizer Ann Livingston when the community was confronted by a surge in fentanyl-related overdoses. It operated illegally for several months before receiving support and funding from Vancouver Coastal Health. Last December, the B.C. government took sweeping steps to expand its response to the crisis, deploying a portable hospital to the area and opening 18 overdose-prevention sites across the province.

In the past year, overdose-prevention tents have also popped up in Nanaimo, Surrey and Toronto, where officials have responded by providing indoor sites.

Blyth believes her society’s “simple” and inexpensive harm-reduction model can quickly be replicated in any Canadian community that lacks an official supervised-consumption site. “It’s pushing government officials,” Blyth said. A block away from the Overdose Prevention Society site, the federally sanctioned Insite supervised injection site recorded close to 215,000 visits in 2016, with 1,781 overdose interventions by its nurses. Since opening in 2003, not one of Insite’s 3.6 million visits has resulted in an overdose death.

Caitlin Shane, community engagement lawyer at Pivot, said having overdose-prevention sites operating in communities alongside supervised consumption sites ensures that a broader range of people who use drugs is served.

Overdose-prevention sites can offer certain advantages such as allowing some people to use drugs communally and spend more time building relationships in their community, Shane said.

“None of this is to suggest that supervised consumption sites in the formal sense are not necessary, but it does suggest that there is a gap in services and that these sort of help to fill that gap,” she said.

Shane said the staggering number of visits to the Overdose Prevention Society in Vancouver demonstrates a desperate need for the expansion of harm-reduction and supervised-consumption services in places across Canada impacted by overdose.