Sickening reality of city centre shooting galleries
INNOCUOUSLY captured by Google Street View, the image of a junkie slumped in the street with a syringe in hand lays bare the sickening reality of so-called heroin ‘shooting galleries’. This desperate sight is common in the neighbourhood surrounding the controversial ‘supervised injection’ facility in Vancouver. Addicts can walk into Insite, as the centre is called, at almost any time of the day or early hours of the morning to inject heroin or cocaine.
At a cost of £1.6million a year, it offers 12 injection ‘stations’, a medical emergency room, counselling offices – and even a ‘chill-out’ room where users can socialise or simply relax after their ‘fix’.
Opened in 2003, Insite is located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside – often described as Canada’s poorest postcode – and was North America’s first ‘legal supervised injection site’.
It is administered by the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority and monitored by Health Canada under a constitutional exemption to the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.
But it has polarised public opinion. Its supporters claim it saves lives, while opponents warn it is a ‘monstrous’ scheme that fuels public disorder and fails to tackle the problems underlying drug addiction. In a 2012 interview, Tim Gauthier, Insite’s clinical co-ordinator and a registered nurse, said: ‘Participants have their own booth, which is clean and sanitary.
‘We offer them new needles, alcohol swabs, a sink to wash their hands and medical care. We can dress their wounds and address chronic health issues.
‘We can also link them up with income assistance and housing.’
Typically, participants are addicts of at least two years and they are ‘usually heavily addicted middle-aged men from the neighbourhood’. All the client needs to do to register is provide his or her initials and date of birth.
They must also sign a waiver of responsibility and say what drug they will be using – usually heroin or cocaine.
No medical history is sought before the person is allowed to inject inside.
Insite is open from 10am to 4am every day and while ‘all trafficking has to happen outside’, drug dealers openly con-
gregate around the centre, which insists it tries to ‘move them along’. Between 2004 and 2010, Insite had an astonishing 1,418 overdoses, without a single one resulting in death on the premises.
But police have reported addicts ‘in the lanes/on the sidewalks and fighting with each other over drugrelated matters’. There is also ‘drug trafficking on the street... creating public disorder problems with their activities’, as well as violence and assaults related to the drug trade. People are also seen ‘urinating and defecating all over the place’, while there is ‘open drug use – both injecting and smoking of drugs’.
In a 2007 study, published in the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice, drugs expert Dr Colin Mangham questioned the claim that ‘no overdose deaths occurred at the site’. Perhaps most shockingly, drug deaths actually rose after the centre was launched.
Dr Mangham, who studied the first three years of the centre’s operation, said: ‘We do not know if any of the overdoses would have resulted in death outside the site.
‘The number of overdose deaths in Vancouver and the DTES [Downtown Eastside area of Vancouver] has increased since Insite started up.
‘This fact at least suggests that in its three years of operation, Insite has produced no impact on overdose deaths.’
Dr Mangham said many published evaluations had downplayed or ignored negative findings to give a false impression that the facility had been successful.
But British Columbia’s health minister Terry Lake said in a statement last month that the province supports new supervised consumption sites, saying three million injections have been done at Insite since it opened with no deaths.
David Berner, executive director of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, said: ‘This strategy is, in my opinion, monstrous’ and ‘based on a belief system that’s completely false’. He explained that the harm reduction strategy underpinning ‘shooting galleries’ assumes ‘addicts are addicts for life and they must be kept comfortable’.
Mr Berner said safe injection facilities promise to ‘give you a clean place to shoot up’ without asking questions about where the drugs came from – ‘and what they [junkies] do after they’ve shot up is break into your car to feed their habit’.