Consumption sites save lives

Victoria will get its first supervised consumption site for illicit drug users, another piece in the puzzle as we struggle to control a crisis that has killed more than 1,700 people since 2016. The site won’t make fentanyl go away, and it won’t solve the problems that lead people to drug addiction, but it will save lives. And we can hope that at least some of those saved lives will be guided to treatment.

Health Canada approved the project last week. The site, which is expected to open in about a year, will be at 941 Pandora Ave. and will be called the Pandora Community Health and Wellness Centre.

“This is going to save lives and take us beyond what our overdose prevention sites are doing,” said Dr. Richard Stanwick, chief medical officer for Island Health. “Now they won’t be a stopgap measure, they are a bridge.”

The stopgaps were the eight overdose prevention sites on the Island, one of which is already operating in a shipping container at the Pandora location. Island Health said there have been 310 overdoses but no deaths out of 26,600 visits to the sites.

The prevention sites have a paramedic and outreach workers, but the supervised consumption site will provide integrated health services, including mental-health counselling, a nursing clinic and referrals to addiction treatment programs. Similar ones have been approved for Kelowna, Kamloops, Surrey and Vancouver.

With overdose deaths rising and expected to surpass last year’s record total, it will be a long wait until spring or summer next year, when the $1.1-million renovation is complete and the 10 consumption booths open.

Another site could be open sooner, if Island Health’s second application for the former Central Care Home housing building at 844 Johnson St. is approved. It already has an overdose-prevention site opened last year for residents and guests, and a new site could open right away after it gets approval.

The flurry of approvals is a sign that governments at all levels recognize the need for action.

Even in the almost war-like atmosphere of partisan politics of the U.S., Democrats and Republicans want to work together, and President Donald Trump had a “major briefing” on the crisis on Tuesday.

While Stanwick calls the site a bridge, no one can call it a solution. It should reduce the death toll, but it seems unlikely to reach the more than 50 per cent of fatalities that happen at home. How to reach those people is another problem.

With fentanyl found in almost 80 per cent of illicit-drug deaths, the crisis has escalated to a level that no one has seen before.

Some, including Jack Phillips from the Society of Illicit Drug Users, think that people who use drugs need access to effective opiate-replacement therapies.

“As long as people are using crap drugs, they will overdose and continue to die,” he said.

But a strategy that has to be part of the solution is at the other end of the process — before people start using. Putting a needle in a vein is, in a sense, not the beginning but the end of a journey that often involves abuse, neglect, mental illness and a host of other forces.

Keeping people away from addiction, difficult though it would be, has to be better than trying to drag them out of it later or writing them off as beyond hope.

The consumption site will save lives, but we also need prevention and treatment with effective followup. This crisis is pushing us to solve a problem that has seen too little action for too long.