Supervised injection site to open this week
After Vancouver, city has highest rate of deaths by overdose in province
Drug users will start injecting their own heroin or other illicit substances at a new supervised injection site opening this week in Surrey in an effort to curb a crisis in overdose deaths.
SafePoint will be British Columbia’s first site outside of Vancouver that allows people to shoot up drugs under medical supervision while they are linked up with other health and social services.
A similar service will be incorporated later this month into an existing clinic in Surrey. The city has had the second-highest number of overdose fatalities in the province after Vancouver.
The B.C. Coroners Service has reported that of the 931 overdose deaths in the province last year, 108 occurred in Surrey. There were 51 overdose fatalities in the first four months of this year in the city.
SafePoint is set to open on Thursday and comes 14 years after the groundbreaking start of Insite in Vancouver in the midst of an HIV epidemic.
Just like at Insite, intravenous drug users will be given clean needles at individual booths where they can inject drugs while being monitored by staff ready to administer the overdose-reversing drug naloxone if necessary.
Anyone who uses illicit substances in a supervised injection site approved by Health Canada is exempt from the country’s drug laws.
Dr. Victoria Lee, Fraser Health’s chief medical health officer, called the department’s approval of SafePoint bittersweet, saying the health authority submitted an application requesting that users also be allowed to snort drugs or take them orally.
“We know that people are dying not only from injecting drugs but orally consuming and internasally consuming as well, and we wanted to provide them with supervised consumption services as well,” Lee said Tuesday outside the new facility.
She said that’s essential because of a public health emergency declared by the province in April 2016 over an unprecedented number of overdose deaths that continues to rise.
Some drug users living in about 70 tents across the street from SafePoint said they would not inject at the clinic because there is a community RCMP policing station next door.
Lee said several surveys of community organizations and substance users suggested people would inject at the facility despite the presence of police nearby.