Safe injection site opens

North America's first supervised safe injection site officially opened Monday in Vancouver. It's designed to give drug users a safer alternative to shooting up in dark and dirty alleys in the Downtown Eastside.

The new way........and .......the old way

Vancouver's chief medical health officer, Dr. John Blatherwick, says critics opposed to the site need to look at the bigger picture.

"If people were dying in other parts of the city and other parts of the province in great numbers as they are concentrated in the Downtown Eastside, we would do something," he says.

• LINK: City's Four Pillars Drug Strategy

Anne Livingstone of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users agrees saying the objective of the new facility is clear.

"It's to stop disease, it's to stop overdose deaths and it's to stop public drug use," she says."And it will do those things because we're going to make sure it does those things."

As many as 800 addicts a day are expected to use the site, which will be open 18 hours a day, when it goes into operation in about a week.

It's estimated there are nearly 5,000 injection drug users in Vancouver's poorest neighbourhood with some of the highest HIV and Hepatitis-C infection rates in the world.

Philip Owen

• LINK: Vancouver Coastal Health Authority

Former mayor Philip Owen, who first fought for the safe injection site, says officials realized there was no alternative.

"Because it's pretty obvious you can't incarcerate your way out of the drug problem. You can't liberalize your way out of it and just give anybody the drugs they want, " he says. "You can't ignore it. So you manage it."

• LINK: Frequently Asked Questions

Owen's successor at city hall, Larry Campbell, says if just 10 people are prevented from contracting HIV because of the site, it will have paid for itself.

"We're talking up to 1,000 injections a day, 365 days per year," says the mayor. "I would love someone to tell me we're not going to keep 10 people from becoming HIV-positive."

• INTERVIEW: The Early Edition's Rick Cluff speaks with Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell. (Runs 6:53)

But not every one buys the argument, including John Walters of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy.

"I think that the advocates of this have to twist the truth, and have to pretend that there's much greater hoplessness than there is.

"And the cost that's going to be paid if that path is followed by more people, is more are going to die and are going to suffer in their lives that don't need to," says Walters.

Police say eight officers will be assigned to patrol the area around the storefront in the 100-block East Hastings. But say that legitimate users of the facility will be left alone.

There are currently 47 safe injection sites operating in Europe, many of them in existence for more than a decade.

• INTERVIEW: B.C. Almanac's Mark Forsythe speaks with recovering addict Dean Wilson of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) one of the people behind the establishment of the new facility. (Runs 8:20)