SafePoint site celebrates a year of saving lives
Surrey’s supervised consumption centre reduces harm, offers a path to recovery
Curtis Carter has good reason to celebrate the big blue portable on 135A Street in Surrey that was there for him during the darkest moment of his life.
Today, staff at Fraser Health’s SafePoint supervised consumption site on the city’s notorious “Strip” will mark a year of saving lives and helping people find recovery from drug addiction.
The site, operated with the nonprofit Lookout Society, is one of 30 federally exempted spaces where people can inject drugs, one of only a dozen where they can also ingest or snort them.
Carter, 52, is certain he would be dead if it wasn’t for the SafePoint staff ’s unrelenting care when he used the site for four months last year.
“It was like an oasis from the Strip because you’re out there in this turmoil of disease and death and brutality that’s going on every day, and you could come in here and they treated you with dignity,” he said. “They listened to you and cared about you, and nobody ever judged you.”
Carter grew up on Vancouver Island and moved to Las Vegas in 2002 to work for an architectural engineering firm. After a car accident there, he was prescribed Percocet for his pain. When the pills ran out, he found a dealer who hooked him up with Vicodin for $60 a day.
But family trouble brought him back to Canada in 2008 and with limited access to opioid pills, he eventually turned to heroin. By late 2015, he was homeless and injecting on the streets of Victoria. Over the summer of 2016 — months after B.C. declared an overdose-related public health emergency due to a flood of fentanyl in the drug supply — he overdosed a dozen times before trying detox, and relapsing.
Last June, just as Carter had become a “worst-case” user of drugs in Surrey, SafePoint opened, he said. Over the next four months, he overdosed 24 more times, but SafePoint’s staff would always bring him back with oxygen and naloxone.
Finally, on Oct. 3, 2017, Carter faced his fate. As soon as he injected his drugs that day, he could tell something was wrong and he would go down hard.
“At this point in my life, I was so depressed, to be quite honest, I wanted to die, I was looking to end it,” he said. “I could hear the staff, that I knew very well, talking to me ... ‘Curtis, breathe.’”
When they brought him back, it wasn’t the brush with death that got him sober but the dread of again feeling so low that life was worthless, he said.
“They recommended I go to the hospital and I listened,” he said. “I said, right away, ‘Can you get me to detox? I just can’t do this anymore.’”
Within 48 hours he was at a withdrawal-management centre, and after a week entered a 12-step recovery program. Earlier this week, he celebrated eight months of sobriety.
Since SafePoint opened on June 8, 2017, more than 1,560 people have paid the site more than 61,570 visits, lately about 200 each day. Staff have reversed more than 620 overdoses, and no one has died.
Dr. Victoria Lee, Fraser Health’s chief medical health officer, said that while SafePoint is known for reducing immediate harms, it also plays a vital role by helping people toward recovery.
One-quarter of SafePoint clients have been referred to treatment and other health and social services, Lee said.
“I think that the point of these services sometimes is to at least connect people to services, and regardless of where they are in their journey, people should be able to access effective and responsive services and supports without judgment,” she said.
“Affording people with substance use disorder the right to live, work and learn, and participate fully in the community, first starts with connecting them with people that can support them.”
On Thursday, new B.C. Coroners Service data revealed that 511 people had died of illicit-drug overdose deaths in the first five months of 2018, including 80 in Surrey.
Ninety per cent happened indoors, and 61 per cent in private homes.
Fraser Health’s death rate was the lowest of B.C.’s health authorities, at 27.1 per 100,000 people, but Lee said any number is too high. The health authority is stepping up efforts to reach people who use indoors, she said.
As for Carter, he is now a SafePoint volunteer peer support worker and mulling a career in addictions counselling.
When he visits old friends on the Strip, they are surprised to see him happier, healthier and stronger, he said. They ask how he did it and, like the SafePoint staff who helped him, he seizes the moment to guide them to recovery.
Six people have already followed his lead.
“I just have a feeling that there’s people out there in the public, because I was one of them, that just wonder why are we doing this for these junkies, why are we wasting this money?” he said.
“But I knew from my own experience, I thought I was worth something.”