[Phanyxx]

Here in Vancouver the safe injection sites have saved countless lives and drastically lowered needle sharing. There's a big misconception that safe injection sites somehow promote drug use. They save lives and give people a legitimate pathway to get clean if they choose to. Do the right thing, SF!

[AnabeeKnox]

It might be a hard sell to use Vancouver as a model. It has an area which is perhaps the most public display of social decay I've ever encounted in a first-world city, principally from drug abuse.

[fatbird]

You didn't see the Downtown Eastside before the safe injection site was opened. Needles filled the gutters. The alleys were where you went to get robbed.

There's a reason the Vancouver City Police support the safe injection site. Crime is down; incidence of AIDs transmission, Hepatitis transmission, STI transmission, down across the board.

I walk through the DTES every day between my home and work. It's ugly. It smells like urine. I walk past people shooting heroin several times a week. It's a hundred times better than it was 20 years ago. It's ugly from our perspective. It's vastly improved from the reality of junkie neighbourhoods when we refused to acknowledge how such communities work and how to help the people in them.

[j0rd]

The DTES is a shit hole, but it was kind of engineered to be that way.

As for the safe injection site stuff, I lived and worked in the area around the time that place was opened.

It was a shit hole before it opened and continued to be so after it opened. I never went in the site, and never cared to. Nothing special around it. People shoot up in the streets all the time and I'd still be careful where you walk to not step on a needle and don't wear sandals ;)

But supposedly this: Rates of HIV infection dropped from 8.1 cases per 100 person-years in 1997 to 0.37 cases per 100 person-years by 2011. By 2015, the 40-block area surrounding the safe injection site had a 35% decline in overdose deaths.

The DTES in Van is a pretty interesting place. It's not as bad as it looks. I personally never had any problems in the area. But it's still a shit hole.

[DrScump]

"But supposedly this: Rates of HIV infection dropped from 8.1 cases per 100 person-years in 1997 to 0.37 cases per 100 person-years by 2011"

I'd like to see a source on that; at minimum, I suspect those numbers would be for new, not total, infections, and I've never seen HIV stats narrowed down to the block level. Plus, sexual transmissions unrelated to the injection site should have accounted for more cases than that.

[jimpick]

Hey! You’re talking about my neighbourhood. (Well, I live a few blocks away in Yaletown, but I’ve spent most of the last 12 years working in Gastown/DTES, since that’s where the startups can afford rent)

The neighbourhood has vastly changed due to condo development, gentrification and government programs. The DTES was really run down a decade ago ... now it’s hipsters everywhere. Great coffee!

The population that has mental health and drug abuse issues has been pushed into a very small area in this city, largely due to past political decisions. Most of the social housing and services are primarily centralized in the DTES. Other neighbourhoods don’t want the social housing and the hard-to-house residents.

I think the drug situation was getting better, but then cheap fentanyl hit, and it’s been tough. Fentanyl is a crisis everywhere.

“Harm reduction” is the only ethical way to go, IMHO. I have friends in nursing that work at the Crosstown Clinic, where they are doing hardcore peer reviewed clinical trials involving prescription heroine, and they are genuinely saving lives and even getting hardcore junkies off drugs completely. Every other city in North America is leaving those people to die.

I’ll take Vancouver, thank you.

[ggg9990]

As someone with no stake in this, I would rather have all of that decay in one place I can avoid rather than strewn about my city.

[lostlogin]

Hamsterdam.

In all seriousness, watch The Wire. It gets you thinking and covers the topic well.

[ggg9990]

The Wire is fiction. The best place to observe the reality is Kensington Avenue in Philadelphia. I have driven through and parked and observed but never gotten out. The one thing the Wire got wrong was how densely packed everyone is... in Kensington Avenue people are only out and about to transact.

[Freestyler_3]

I opened the article and immediatly thought "oh this is a plan straight from the wire"

Knew someone was going to mention it :)

[s0rce]

But realistically that does nothing to solve the problem. We could just designate SF the safe injection site for the USA and the problem would be out of view for the rest of the population.

[fatbird]

When it's concentrated in one neighbourhood, you can concentrate social services in that neighbourhood. The DTES has a bank dedicated to avoiding paying a percentage of welfare checks to check cashing businesses. Insite has a rehab facility attached to it with a higher rate of non-recidivism after one year than any other in North America. Safe injections sites work. The Vancouver City Police are one of the biggest supporters of the Vancouver safe injection site, which should tell you something.

[sergers]

I don't think safe injection sites solve that problem, it's about making a safe environment for junkies to safely take drugs in hopes they don't do it elsewhere littering needles and drug paraphernalia in other public spaces, especially around children.

Now for the junkies, needs to be more than a safe haven to shoot up and definitely agree with your sentiments. I know they offer more than that, but some people just want that and that's the problem

[blackbagboys]

The hope is that the "junkies" don't die. If that is all that's accomplished, that's still a success. There doesn't need to be more. Obviously there should be an option for users to enter treatment or receive some sort of assistance, but addicts should definitely not be forced into anything just to satisfy some petit bourgeois stern moral impulse, because that will ultimately drive people away and cost lives.

[AnabeeKnox]

"petit bourgeois stern moral impulse"

I don't know if you've ever met a working-class person, but I think you have things the opposite way round. It tends to be the middle-class petit-bourgeois who advocate a tolerant approach to the victims of drug abuse. Working-class people despise junkies because they are on the front-line of the associated crime, decay, danger, filth, child-neglect, disease etc.

[meri_dian]

I'm not sure how you've constructed morality in your mind, but if you choose to belittle people who want to protect innocent people from the ravages of heroin addiction, which is a lifelong sickness, then you are misguided.

The real measure of success is how few people become junkies in the first place.

[steve_adams_86]

This isn't a sustainable solution to that problem. In Vancouver, rapid gentrification is simply pushing these people around once again anyway. We need long term solutions. Social nets which work to help these people get back on track, prevent people from getting on that track, and soften the blow of hitting rock bottom. I have a strong sense that supporting mental health issues more effectively is at the heart of this.

[220V_USKettle]

It didn't work for 'Bunny'.

[Tiktaalik]

SF's Tenderloin is the same though. If anything it seems worse.

[chx]

> the safe injection sites

Very interesting, I wanted to fix your plural because I only knew of Insite but turns out there are now two, there's Powell Street Getaway since last summer. http://www.vch.ca/public-health/harm-reduction/supervised-in...