"Allowing supervised injection sites to remain open is also allowing people to freely inject themselves with harmful drugs, create unsafe neighbourhoods, and spend millions of dollars that can be spent on other forms of treatment"- the closing statements of
Nimerta Randhowa's blog post in support of shutting down safe injection sites. Safe injection sites exist in Canada for a reason, and work to benefit both those affected by drug addiction and the community as a whole.
Although she does note the basic definition of what a safe injection site is, she fails to acknowledge the extent of services that these facilities provide. In fact, she defines the sites as "facilities where addicts can come and consume illegal, recreational drugs in a hygienic space with medical supervision", which contradicts her closing claim that safe injection sites allow users to "freely inject themselves". Organizations like InSite provide trained medical staff to control and respond to potential overdoses, and according to
Vancouver Coastal Health's website, there were 1, 781 prevented overdoses in 2016 alone because of the work of InSite employees.
She also believes that in regards to the promotion of less harmful injections, "This will make it more difficult for users to quit their drug habits as they able to satisfy their addiction without worrying about the possible repercussions", which yet again doesn't acknowledge the full capacity of InSite's services. Not only does the site provide medical supervision and response to overdose situations, but also counselling and referrals to other services including
OnSite, which is the organization's detox and rehabilitation facility.
Nimerta claims that the existence of safe injection sites "create unsafe neighbourhoods", another entirely false statement. Firstly, safe injection facilities are placed within areas where drug addiction and "gathering point[s]" of users already exist, such as Vancouver's East Hastings street. Nimerta notes at the beginning of her post that, "Vancouver's East Hastings street is notorious for its drug epidemic", and its not a coincidence that both InSite's
Safe Injection Site and the
Insite for Community Safety building reside within the East Hastings community. Therefore, safe injection sites are rather bringing aid to already unsafe neighbourhoods rather than creating new ones as Nimerta suggests.
Additionally, one of the services that InSite offers is
needle exchange and disposal, which provides cleaning services to public spaces in the event that used syringes have been incorrectly discarded. Therefore, these organizations are creating safer public spaces rather than endangering the public as has been suggested by the initial argument.
Another point that Nimerta argues in her post is that of the high expenses required to support running safe injection sites. As presented previously, she believes that in order to run safe injection sites, "[the government] spend millions of dollars that can be spent on other forms of treatment", but according to a
Global News article by Dr. Samir Gupta, this is not the case. Gupta states that, "it would also save us almost $43 million" due to the high costs of Hep C treatments alone if we continue allowing safe injection sites to operate.
Safe injection sites aren't solely places where addicts can inject in a less harmful environment, but rather an entry points to access other services related to addiction support and mental health programs. They are not spaces for drug use promotion, but rather ones for rehabilitation. Once the majority of society is capable of comprehending this fact, then maybe safe injection sites will be granted the support to reach their full potential.
Search Engine Optimized (SEO)
Google Trends showed that in the last 12 months, the search "safe injection sites" (25) was searched for far greater times than "supervised injection sites"(5) - showing a spike in searches around the unveiling of facilities like InSite (2003). I then compared the terms 'solution' and 'option', and found that the term 'solution' (88) scored higher than 'option' (36). Lastly, I found that the term 'recovery'(88) placed significantly higher in searches than that of 'rehab' (28).
