Insite not the answer, but it helps
June 6, 2008
Perhaps you’re already familiar with that ancient fable about the six blind men and the elephant. I find it coming to mind a lot these days in the fight over Canada’s only supervised injection site.
The Indian fable, put into charming verse in 1873 by John Godfrey Saxe, tells the story of how the six men interpreted what an elephant looked like based on whatever part of the elephant’s anatomy they touched first. One touches the animal’s massive side and concludes it must resemble a wall; another grabs the trunk and presumes that elephants are shaped like snakes; and so on. (http://www.noogenesis.com/pineapple/blind_men_elephant.html if you’re curious).
The point I’ve always taken from the fable is that it’s impossible to reach the right conclusion if you presume that what you know is all there is to know. Problems are solved not by bickering over six different versions of an elephant but by bringing those viewpoints together to understand the whole.
It’s pretty clear from the battle shaping up around Vancouver’s supervised injection site that we’ve got an elephant on our hands. Blinkered by an ideological viewpoint that simply doesn’t allow for a fuller picture to emerge, the federal government has a tight grasp of the elephant’s tail and an equally firm conviction that its version is the only one that matters.
We can fight it out in court, I suppose, and that appears to be what we’re headed for. A win in B.C. Supreme Court last week that deemed the pending closure of Insite unconstitutional is headed for appeals court and no doubt the Supreme Court of Canada now that Ottawa has made it clear that its sole goal is to shut Insite down.
I suspect last week’s ruling will ultimately be upheld. But for the 8,000 users of Insite who face being hung out to dry for the next decade while we argue about what constitutes an elephant - not to mention tens of thousands of other Canadians who could benefit from similar sites in their own communities - I can only hope for a much quicker resolution than a court fight will ever bring us.
My personal view of places like Insite is that they’re a small but important component of an overall strategy for reducing the harms of drug and alcohol use.
They certainly don’t solve all of the problems around addiction, or even most of them. Nor are they universally supported by people with addictions in their own background, some of whom are every bit as adamantly opposed to injection sites as the Conservative government.
But supervised injection sites do keep people alive to fight another day. They bring a desperate and isolated population into contact with professionals who want to help them. They provide health care to a group of people who otherwise receive very little due to widespread stigmatization of their particular illness.
They reduce the spread of costly and difficult diseases. They provide a badly needed alternative to open drug use on our streets by those too addicted to hide their problems any more. Meanwhile, as has been proven at Insite, they don’t lead to increased street problems or higher rates of crime. That’s good enough for me.
The government questions whether the dire situation in the Downtown Eastside has improved at all since the site opened four years ago, and contends that Insite’s $3 million annual budget would be better spent on “treatment.”
Federal Health Minister Tony Clement is absolutely right when he says much more money needs to be put toward treatment for addictions. But for many of Vancouver’s most disadvantaged users, Insite is where treatment starts.
For some, a visit to the supervised site will be a first step toward recovery. I don’t know how Clement envisages people with severe addictions finding the help they need to begin that journey, but in my experience it starts with them getting support in a place where they’re accepted just as they are.
For others, recovery will be years in the making, perhaps even unachievable. But at the very least they will benefit from a safe, clean place to inject, and our communities will benefit from a reduction in the ferocious bacterial and viral infections spread through street-level injection drug use.
As for fears we’re sending a “poor message” to youth about drug use by allowing supervised injection sites, that’s just one of those fictions that lazy people dream up to create emotional heat around an unsound argument. Nothing says “Kids, don’t do drugs” better than the haunted visage of someone in late-stage addiction.
With as many as 125,000 Canadians thought to be injecting illicit drugs, the elephant is upon us. Time to open our eyes and see the beast for what it is.
I'm a communications strategist and writer with a journalism background, a drifter's spirit, and a growing sense of alarm at where this world is going. I am happiest when writing pieces that identify, contextualize and background societal problems big and small in hopes of helping us at least slow our deepening crises.
Sunday, June 08, 2008
Tuesday, June 03, 2008
The problem is doing nothing about the problem
May 31, 2008
I have no particular stake in what Richard LeBlanc is trying to accomplish on Woodwynn Farm, other than a broad interest in anything that aims to tackle the problems on our streets. I don’t know how big a dent his project will make on the most obvious challenges facing the downtown.
But word last week that a citizens’ group had formed to try to buy the farm before he does was still some of the most discouraging news I’d heard in a while. That people would rally to raise more than $6 million just to stop a guy from trying to do a good thing - well, that’s just such a sad statement of where we’re at in this region.
What’s to be done in a community where the biggest problem is an inability to address the problem?
At least we’re no longer debating whether we have social problems. We’ve even reached some consensus on the work that needs to be done: housing (and more housing), outreach, better mental health care, accessible and integrated services, job opportunities, reconnection to community.
Ah, but where will we build those services? That’s the issue that’s stopping us dead right now. We talk a good game about wanting problems solved, but only if it all takes place in someone else’s neighbourhood.
An acronym has already been coined, of course: YITBY, for “Yes, in Their Backyard.”
The group opposing LeBlanc’s project offers a timely example. Farm Trust chair Barbara Souther, a long-time neighbour of Woodwynn Farm, mentioned in media coverage this week that she’s all in favour of helping the homeless, but thinks an empty school a few kilometres away would be a much better location. I wonder what neighbours of the school would say about that.
Similarly, tensions are said to be running high within the Downtown Residents Association between those who live near the now-defunct needle exchange on Cormorant Street - which is permanently closed as of tomorrow - and those who live in the neighbourhoods where the new mobile exchange will operate.
One neighbourhood wins, another loses. Whoever mounts the loudest campaign wins the right to dump the problem into somebody else’s lap for a while, at least until that group can mount their own campaign to push it elsewhere.
But isn’t the challenge, then, to strive for one of those “win-win” solutions we like to talk about? We need to get past the surface hostilities and figure out what it would take for a neighbourhood to feel comfortable enough to say “yes” for a change.
There are many ways to make an unpalatable idea more palatable. Resistant B.C. communities quickly changed their tune about hosting provincial casinos, for example, after they were given a cut of the profits.
What’s the carrot we could use to appease neighbourhoods asked to host projects tackling street issues? Would a tax break help? More community amenities? What are people actually afraid of, and what could be done to convince them that their concerns will be addressed?
I’m anticipating several angry e-mails in response to this column along the line of, “Oh, yeah? Well, how would you like a bunch of homeless people living next door to you? Let’s see if you’re so damn supportive once they’re breaking into YOUR house.”
If that’s how things played out, then yes, I’d be unhappy. But as we know from any number of potentially controversial services operating below the radar in their particular neighbourhoods - detox, halfway houses, women’s shelters, recovery houses - a well-run and properly resourced service doesn’t draw problems.
It’s understandable why people fear the worst, mind you. The reason things blew up on Cormorant Street wasn’t because a needle exchange was located there, but because it could no longer cope with changing client demographics and a caseload that had tripled since 2002 with no corresponding rise in funding. We taught people to expect a mess should the needle exchange ever come to their neighbourhood, and the challenge in that case is to be absolutely sure we do it right the next time round.
The situation is different in the case of LeBlanc’s farm. His opponents are anticipating problems that I doubt will even materialize. Therapeutic communities like the one he’s proposing hinge on a careful selection process to ensure a good fit with people ready for change. Neighbours need not fear the arrival of busloads of struggling, addicted people plucked fresh from the streets (nor will LeBlanc’s proposal fix all our problems downtown).
We need new ways of resolving an old problem - not homelessness, but our community’s inability to act. Until then, we’re just putting a whole lot of energy into standing still.
May 31, 2008
I have no particular stake in what Richard LeBlanc is trying to accomplish on Woodwynn Farm, other than a broad interest in anything that aims to tackle the problems on our streets. I don’t know how big a dent his project will make on the most obvious challenges facing the downtown.
But word last week that a citizens’ group had formed to try to buy the farm before he does was still some of the most discouraging news I’d heard in a while. That people would rally to raise more than $6 million just to stop a guy from trying to do a good thing - well, that’s just such a sad statement of where we’re at in this region.
What’s to be done in a community where the biggest problem is an inability to address the problem?
At least we’re no longer debating whether we have social problems. We’ve even reached some consensus on the work that needs to be done: housing (and more housing), outreach, better mental health care, accessible and integrated services, job opportunities, reconnection to community.
Ah, but where will we build those services? That’s the issue that’s stopping us dead right now. We talk a good game about wanting problems solved, but only if it all takes place in someone else’s neighbourhood.
An acronym has already been coined, of course: YITBY, for “Yes, in Their Backyard.”
The group opposing LeBlanc’s project offers a timely example. Farm Trust chair Barbara Souther, a long-time neighbour of Woodwynn Farm, mentioned in media coverage this week that she’s all in favour of helping the homeless, but thinks an empty school a few kilometres away would be a much better location. I wonder what neighbours of the school would say about that.
Similarly, tensions are said to be running high within the Downtown Residents Association between those who live near the now-defunct needle exchange on Cormorant Street - which is permanently closed as of tomorrow - and those who live in the neighbourhoods where the new mobile exchange will operate.
One neighbourhood wins, another loses. Whoever mounts the loudest campaign wins the right to dump the problem into somebody else’s lap for a while, at least until that group can mount their own campaign to push it elsewhere.
But isn’t the challenge, then, to strive for one of those “win-win” solutions we like to talk about? We need to get past the surface hostilities and figure out what it would take for a neighbourhood to feel comfortable enough to say “yes” for a change.
There are many ways to make an unpalatable idea more palatable. Resistant B.C. communities quickly changed their tune about hosting provincial casinos, for example, after they were given a cut of the profits.
What’s the carrot we could use to appease neighbourhoods asked to host projects tackling street issues? Would a tax break help? More community amenities? What are people actually afraid of, and what could be done to convince them that their concerns will be addressed?
I’m anticipating several angry e-mails in response to this column along the line of, “Oh, yeah? Well, how would you like a bunch of homeless people living next door to you? Let’s see if you’re so damn supportive once they’re breaking into YOUR house.”
If that’s how things played out, then yes, I’d be unhappy. But as we know from any number of potentially controversial services operating below the radar in their particular neighbourhoods - detox, halfway houses, women’s shelters, recovery houses - a well-run and properly resourced service doesn’t draw problems.
It’s understandable why people fear the worst, mind you. The reason things blew up on Cormorant Street wasn’t because a needle exchange was located there, but because it could no longer cope with changing client demographics and a caseload that had tripled since 2002 with no corresponding rise in funding. We taught people to expect a mess should the needle exchange ever come to their neighbourhood, and the challenge in that case is to be absolutely sure we do it right the next time round.
The situation is different in the case of LeBlanc’s farm. His opponents are anticipating problems that I doubt will even materialize. Therapeutic communities like the one he’s proposing hinge on a careful selection process to ensure a good fit with people ready for change. Neighbours need not fear the arrival of busloads of struggling, addicted people plucked fresh from the streets (nor will LeBlanc’s proposal fix all our problems downtown).
We need new ways of resolving an old problem - not homelessness, but our community’s inability to act. Until then, we’re just putting a whole lot of energy into standing still.
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Welfare outreach puts workers where the homeless are
May 23, 2008
Wendy Sinke remembers wishing the cameras were there one rainy afternoon a few months into her new job.
She was on a downtown sidewalk, balancing an umbrella over her homeless client’s scooter so he and her laptop wouldn’t get wet while he filled out the income-assistance forms she’d brought him. Sinke figures a photo would have been worth a thousand words at that moment as a symbol of changing times.
An outreach worker with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA), Sinke is part of a new government strategy that ends years of trying to get everyone off income assistance, and instead aims to get a few more on it. The program was launched on the Island last fall after highly successful pilots on the streets of a few small B.C. towns two years ago.
Sinke works with Victoria’s new multi-disciplinary outreach team, which grew out of the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force report on homelessness. Her role on the team is to find people living on the streets who ought to be on income assistance, and make it happen.
Most of the people she’s dealing with have mental illness. Many have a deep and long-standing distrust of government. The major challenge is in developing that trust, says Sinke.
“I definitely don’t go around announcing, ‘Hi, I’m Wendy from the government,’” says Sinke. “Even when I get them on income assistance, they may not always know I’m with MEIA.”
MEIA has had outreach offices for 12 years, including the Downtown Outreach Service on Cormorant Street. But what’s new about Sinke and her co-workers is that they’re now going out to find people rather than just waiting to be found, and speeding them through the process.
The ministry’s outreach workers have also been given more flexibility around policy - an essential change in terms of working successfully with folks who wouldn’t be able to make their way through the system otherwise.
If somebody doesn’t have identification, for instance - a universal problem for those living in the chaos of the streets - Sinke can not only help them fill out the application forms, but offers to keep their ID safe at her office if they want. She can even skip the ID requirement altogether if a street-serving agency can verify who the person is.
“A group of outreach workers meet every Monday morning, and everybody there knows the street clients,” says Sinke. “So if someone from that group calls to tell me that John Smith is in their office right now and could I come down, I’ll be pretty darn sure that’s John Smith.”
B.C. income assistance is divided into two portions, one for shelter and the other for support. Until they find housing, people living on the streets can’t qualify for the shelter portion - currently $375 a month for a single person. But they can collect $235 a month in support, and up to $532 if they’re considered disabled.
Sinke divvies up her clients’ monthly stipends into weekly payments if they request it, which helps them make their money last while also avoiding the month-end welfare spending splurge known on the streets as “Mardi Gras.”
Sinke’s previous job was working at the Victoria Transition House. That gave her an understanding of societal prejudices as relevant for people on the streets as they are for women fleeing domestic violence. Why a person can’t find their own way off the street is as complex a problem as why a woman stays with an abusive spouse, she notes.
With people on the streets slowly becoming more aware of MEIA’s outreach program, the next big challenge is to make sure service providers know about it, says Sinke.
Under pressure from two consecutive governments, B.C.’s income-assistance caseload as a percentage of the population has fallen by two-thirds since 1995 - from nine per cent of British Columbians to three per cent. Service providers have understandably come to believe that many clients don’t stand much chance of qualifying.
But things have changed, says Sinke: “Unless you’re 18 and fresh out of high school, there are enough exemptions now that nobody needs to be denied.”
The changes are small but significant, and urgently needed as part of the strategy for ending homelessness. Sinke sees the proof of that in her caseload files: In the last five months alone, she’s helped find housing for 12 of her clients.
“These were absolute street people, with long histories of living on the streets. Many of them didn’t even want housing when I first met them,” says Sinke. “That just shows how well this program works.”
May 23, 2008
Wendy Sinke remembers wishing the cameras were there one rainy afternoon a few months into her new job.
She was on a downtown sidewalk, balancing an umbrella over her homeless client’s scooter so he and her laptop wouldn’t get wet while he filled out the income-assistance forms she’d brought him. Sinke figures a photo would have been worth a thousand words at that moment as a symbol of changing times.
An outreach worker with the Ministry of Employment and Income Assistance (MEIA), Sinke is part of a new government strategy that ends years of trying to get everyone off income assistance, and instead aims to get a few more on it. The program was launched on the Island last fall after highly successful pilots on the streets of a few small B.C. towns two years ago.
Sinke works with Victoria’s new multi-disciplinary outreach team, which grew out of the 2007 Mayor’s Task Force report on homelessness. Her role on the team is to find people living on the streets who ought to be on income assistance, and make it happen.
Most of the people she’s dealing with have mental illness. Many have a deep and long-standing distrust of government. The major challenge is in developing that trust, says Sinke.
“I definitely don’t go around announcing, ‘Hi, I’m Wendy from the government,’” says Sinke. “Even when I get them on income assistance, they may not always know I’m with MEIA.”
MEIA has had outreach offices for 12 years, including the Downtown Outreach Service on Cormorant Street. But what’s new about Sinke and her co-workers is that they’re now going out to find people rather than just waiting to be found, and speeding them through the process.
The ministry’s outreach workers have also been given more flexibility around policy - an essential change in terms of working successfully with folks who wouldn’t be able to make their way through the system otherwise.
If somebody doesn’t have identification, for instance - a universal problem for those living in the chaos of the streets - Sinke can not only help them fill out the application forms, but offers to keep their ID safe at her office if they want. She can even skip the ID requirement altogether if a street-serving agency can verify who the person is.
“A group of outreach workers meet every Monday morning, and everybody there knows the street clients,” says Sinke. “So if someone from that group calls to tell me that John Smith is in their office right now and could I come down, I’ll be pretty darn sure that’s John Smith.”
B.C. income assistance is divided into two portions, one for shelter and the other for support. Until they find housing, people living on the streets can’t qualify for the shelter portion - currently $375 a month for a single person. But they can collect $235 a month in support, and up to $532 if they’re considered disabled.
Sinke divvies up her clients’ monthly stipends into weekly payments if they request it, which helps them make their money last while also avoiding the month-end welfare spending splurge known on the streets as “Mardi Gras.”
Sinke’s previous job was working at the Victoria Transition House. That gave her an understanding of societal prejudices as relevant for people on the streets as they are for women fleeing domestic violence. Why a person can’t find their own way off the street is as complex a problem as why a woman stays with an abusive spouse, she notes.
With people on the streets slowly becoming more aware of MEIA’s outreach program, the next big challenge is to make sure service providers know about it, says Sinke.
Under pressure from two consecutive governments, B.C.’s income-assistance caseload as a percentage of the population has fallen by two-thirds since 1995 - from nine per cent of British Columbians to three per cent. Service providers have understandably come to believe that many clients don’t stand much chance of qualifying.
But things have changed, says Sinke: “Unless you’re 18 and fresh out of high school, there are enough exemptions now that nobody needs to be denied.”
The changes are small but significant, and urgently needed as part of the strategy for ending homelessness. Sinke sees the proof of that in her caseload files: In the last five months alone, she’s helped find housing for 12 of her clients.
“These were absolute street people, with long histories of living on the streets. Many of them didn’t even want housing when I first met them,” says Sinke. “That just shows how well this program works.”
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
Do you know where your laws are?
May 16, 2008
By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.
May 16, 2008
By the end of May, hundreds of new and amended laws will take effect in B.C., almost none of which have been given any public scrutiny.
In a scant three months, the provincial government has hustled 18 bills into law. At least another six are expected to be passed by the time the legislature recesses for the summer at the end of this month.
The bills affect hundreds of regulations from dozens of acts. The proposed Wills, Estates and Succession Act, for instance, has 276 regulations. The Public Health Act has 161. The Miscellaneous Amendments Act incorporates changes to 29 other acts.
Unless you’ve got considerably more time than me for a self-directed, regulation-by-regulation comparison of the changes, you and I remain equally in the dark as to what they are, the impact they’ll have or the rationale behind them.
Many are little more than housekeeping, of course, and others are welcome news. It’s great to hear of new laws protecting military reservists’ jobs back home when they’re sent to war.
But a number of curiosities and concerns are hidden under the mountain of words as well. Whether or not the bills ultimately make it through in the waning days of this legislative session, surely British Columbians at least deserve the chance to mull things over before new laws are brought into effect.
For instance, how was it decided that if a person dies within five days of a spouse who died first, that in fact it’s as if the second death happened first in terms of sorting out whose will takes precedent? (That bill has since been scrapped.) What will it mean to be required to launch an additional claim on behalf of government from this point on when we sue someone who has injured us? Is it good that the B.C. Society for the Prevention of Animals will be effectively immune from lawsuits?
Those were just a few of the questions to cross my mind during the briefest of perusals of the 43 bills on the docket right now (http://www.leg.bc.ca/38th4th/votes/progress-of-bills.htm). What might be revealed by a truly thorough review?
Certainly some of the proposed changes to the Election Act ought to give us pause, as they’ll disenfranchise an estimated five per cent of potential voters - some 170,000 people. The revised act prevents people from voting unless they have a home address and the government-issued, photo ID to prove it.
Obviously, those changes will be felt disproportionately by poor people: those living on the streets; people who can’t afford ID; people who change residences frequently.
I doubt the government deliberately set out to disenfranchise this group of people, and was more likely just seeking a cheap and easy way to cut down on the outdated information and numerous wrong addresses on B.C.’s official voters’ list.
But New Democrat MLA Rob Fleming rightly notes that unintended or not, the fact that people will be disenfranchised can hardly come as a surprise to the province given all the heated debate on the same point that preceded a similar bill at the federal level that became law last year. (That law is now being challenged in court.)
What particularly offends me is the government’s attempt in the media to portray the residency changes as a response to concerns raised by Elections BC. Read the 2006-07 annual report of Elections BC and you’ll see the lie of that.
The agency in fact recommended that more effort be made to register voters, given that almost half of eligible British Columbians don’t vote. In the 2005 election, Elections BC staff visited 125 shelters in the province specifically to sign up homeless voters.
You could make an argument that requiring voters to have ID listing their current address is necessary to prevent fraud. But as the Elections BC annual report also points out, there’s no fraud going on.
The agency combed through the 1.7 million votes cast in the 2005 provincial election and deemed 44 of them worthy of more investigation. But all they found when they took a deeper look were confused elderly people, mistakes by Elections BC staff, and a few folks who were too sick to know they’d made a mistake.
“Election BC’s conclusion is that there was no intention to vote fraudulently,” concluded the report.
The essence of a society is contained in its laws, and nothing is more important than getting those laws right. Governments simply can’t be allowed to define new law without our oversight and involvement.
Time to speak up, folks. Write to Premier Gordon Campbell at premier@gov.bc.ca; Attorney General Wally Oppal through his assistant at gail.c.dawson@gov.bc.ca; and to your local MLA (http://www.leg.bc.ca/Mla/3-1-1.htm). Exercise your democratic rights before they’re gone for good.
Monday, May 12, 2008
Homeless needle exchange hits road for better or worse
May 9, 2008
We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result.
As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on.
What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it.
Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting it, and a day-care centre right across the street.
Those days are long gone, and for reasons that have little to do with the needle exchange itself.
Most notably, the number of people using the needle exchange has increased dramatically - from 500 clients in 1996 to more than 1,500 today, with no concurrent increase in funding. Up until a small lift last fall in the midst of a community uproar over Cormorant Street, the exchange had been juggling triple the number of clients with the same staffing levels as a decade ago.
The drugs have changed as well, says AVI communications co-ordinator Andrea Langlois. More mellow drugs like heroin have given way to intense ones like cocaine and crystal meth, which can crank up negative behaviours in users due to the way they affect brain chemicals.
Both of those drugs are also injected far more frequently by addicted users - sometimes 20 or more times a day. That has increased traffic at the exchange.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of people out there. The number of people living on the streets has grown fivefold since the exchange moved into its current Cormorant Street location in 2001. With most other services closed up at night, the exchange evolved into a place where the street community could hang out.
No surprise, then, that the neighbours gradually worked themselves into a fury over the discarded needles, garbage and steady stream of sick, scabby people they were seeing outside their doors. The owner of the building that housed the exchange gave AVI notice last fall that the service had to go.
Months of fruitless searching for another location followed. There was a plan to move the exchange into a Pandora Avenue building next to Our Place drop-in, but that fell through after alarmed parents from a private school a couple blocks away nixed the move. With the May 31 eviction date now looming, AVI has no choice but to go mobile.
It’s a most peculiar development for a region that really can’t afford any more evidence of the social decay in its core. Up until now, we’ve had one needle exchange; now we’ll have one wherever AVI’s van stops. What’s our plan for when those neighbourhoods inevitably start to complain?
Langlois is especially worried about the clients who like to maintain a low profile - the ones who stop by every night after work to pick up a needle or two.
They’re not going to want to risk being identified by having to make their exchange in a public place, especially if TV camera crew decide to make a big deal out of following the van on its route. The opportunity to connect clients with other services - including detox and treatment - will also be lost when the exchange goes mobile.
“We really don’t know how successful we’ll be in maintaining the number of needles exchanged once we’re mobile,” says Langlois, adding that if the number of exchanges drops off, “there’s potential for an epidemic of hepatitis-C in this city.”
The needles may be what bring people through the door, says Steve Bradley, a Christian outreach worker and recovering addict who used to run a support group at the exchange. But it’s the support and sense of connection that people get while there that can change their lives, he notes. Without it, there’s no way out.
“You close the needle exchange, you’re going to see crime downtown increasing,” predicts Bradley. “We can’t afford to lose that place.”
Got a widemouth plastic water bottle to throw out in the wake of the bisphenol-A scare? Drop it off at the needle exchange this month - they’ll hand the bottles out to clients as “sharps” containers for needle disposal.
May 9, 2008
We’re about to become the first major city in Canada to pull the plug on its needle exchange, without a clue what will happen as a result.
As of the end of May, the region’s largest needle exchange will close its doors on Cormorant Street and begin a mobile service. The business of exchanging as many as 2,000 needles a day will be done on the street from that point on.
What’s the rationale? There isn’t one. It’s just what happens when the chips are left to fall where they may. The needle exchange is going mobile not because it’s an effective strategy on any front, but simply because no place can be found for it.
Greater Victoria has had a needle exchange for almost 20 years, operated by AIDS Vancouver Island. You’d never know it from the hand-wringing and hysteria that has accompanied any mention of the exchange this past year or two, but once upon a time the exchange had neighbours who actually wrote letters supporting it, and a day-care centre right across the street.
Those days are long gone, and for reasons that have little to do with the needle exchange itself.
Most notably, the number of people using the needle exchange has increased dramatically - from 500 clients in 1996 to more than 1,500 today, with no concurrent increase in funding. Up until a small lift last fall in the midst of a community uproar over Cormorant Street, the exchange had been juggling triple the number of clients with the same staffing levels as a decade ago.
The drugs have changed as well, says AVI communications co-ordinator Andrea Langlois. More mellow drugs like heroin have given way to intense ones like cocaine and crystal meth, which can crank up negative behaviours in users due to the way they affect brain chemicals.
Both of those drugs are also injected far more frequently by addicted users - sometimes 20 or more times a day. That has increased traffic at the exchange.
Then there’s just the sheer volume of people out there. The number of people living on the streets has grown fivefold since the exchange moved into its current Cormorant Street location in 2001. With most other services closed up at night, the exchange evolved into a place where the street community could hang out.
No surprise, then, that the neighbours gradually worked themselves into a fury over the discarded needles, garbage and steady stream of sick, scabby people they were seeing outside their doors. The owner of the building that housed the exchange gave AVI notice last fall that the service had to go.
Months of fruitless searching for another location followed. There was a plan to move the exchange into a Pandora Avenue building next to Our Place drop-in, but that fell through after alarmed parents from a private school a couple blocks away nixed the move. With the May 31 eviction date now looming, AVI has no choice but to go mobile.
It’s a most peculiar development for a region that really can’t afford any more evidence of the social decay in its core. Up until now, we’ve had one needle exchange; now we’ll have one wherever AVI’s van stops. What’s our plan for when those neighbourhoods inevitably start to complain?
Langlois is especially worried about the clients who like to maintain a low profile - the ones who stop by every night after work to pick up a needle or two.
They’re not going to want to risk being identified by having to make their exchange in a public place, especially if TV camera crew decide to make a big deal out of following the van on its route. The opportunity to connect clients with other services - including detox and treatment - will also be lost when the exchange goes mobile.
“We really don’t know how successful we’ll be in maintaining the number of needles exchanged once we’re mobile,” says Langlois, adding that if the number of exchanges drops off, “there’s potential for an epidemic of hepatitis-C in this city.”
The needles may be what bring people through the door, says Steve Bradley, a Christian outreach worker and recovering addict who used to run a support group at the exchange. But it’s the support and sense of connection that people get while there that can change their lives, he notes. Without it, there’s no way out.
“You close the needle exchange, you’re going to see crime downtown increasing,” predicts Bradley. “We can’t afford to lose that place.”
Got a widemouth plastic water bottle to throw out in the wake of the bisphenol-A scare? Drop it off at the needle exchange this month - they’ll hand the bottles out to clients as “sharps” containers for needle disposal.
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