Drug-injection sites save lives
AS YOU WERE SAYING ...
Imagine being severely addicted, cut off from family and finances; desperate. Now imagine a supportive place where you could manage and hopefully transcend your addiction and related problems. Such places, called supervised injection facilities, or SIFs, are a proven, effective way to confront the devastation of lives lost among the severely addicted and undertreated.
We have mourned too many deaths even as doctors, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and street dealers push instant miracles — quick fixes — on the vulnerable. It is of little import whether those victims had character flaws, unlucky genes, an acquired brain disease, or confronted unspeakable emotional or physical hurt. They are everywhere and anyone.
But addictive drugs and people who use them have always been with us. And so we must ask: Why are so many dying?
The circumstances under which many ingest drugs are often more life-threatening than the powerful drugs themselves.
Users are isolated, stigmatized and fearful of the authorities. Fear of arrest leads to furtive, unsafe practices and death.
Most users cannot know the potency or actual contents of their drug. Zero tolerance — the demand for abstinence or else — in both treatment programs and prison yields people whose tolerance drops such that the first time they relapse, they may be killed by formerly manageable doses.
Politicians and police departments are mercifully moving from punitive, zero tolerance policies toward a more supportive harm-reduction approach, including needle exchanges and Narcan — acknowledging that neither the drugs nor those using them are going away.
These changes are part of a welcome move toward effective treatment, which is labor intensive, hands-on, and non-punitive. It features connection, caring and respect. And it demands responsibility on the part of the addicted.
Which brings us to perhaps the most potent medical tool in this effort: supervised injection facilities — the answer to medical homelessness.
At such facilities, people bring in and ingest street-bought drugs under the supervision of supportive medical professionals who can test for potency and contamination. There are roughly 100 SIFs in over half a dozen countries. And after literally millions of such injections, there has yet to be a fatality. Overdoses are routinely and safely reversed. Supported by the American Medical Association and the Massachusetts Medical Society, this medical intervention has been shown to work in hundreds of peerreviewed studies without negative side effects.
It is a portal to hope proven to reduce public disorder, not an additional burden on burdened neighborhoods.
The oath to do no harm includes the imperative to not withhold viable, proven treatments, whether in the form of a pill or a policy. SIFs are a proven, life-saving medical treatment.
We have, all of us, mourned too many unnecessary deaths. How can a measured, effective response to the epidemic not include this treatment option?
The oath to do no harm includes the imperative to not withhold viable, proven treatments, whether in teh form of a pill or a policy.