Safe Injection Sites approved for edm, Cgy announcement tba

[corporatejay]

What is the recovery rate of people using heavy drugs like this? Like it's a nice story that we are all about tolerance and helping the "underprivileged" but if most of these people will be junkies and a social drain until the day they die, what are we really doing here? Sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens for persons who have chosen a high risk lifestyle with severe consequences? That seems crazy.

[Cowboy89]

Originally Posted by corporatejay

What is the recovery rate of people using heavy drugs like this? Like it's a nice story that we are all about tolerance and helping the "underprivileged" but if most of these people will be junkies and a social drain until the day they die, what are we really doing here? Sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens for persons who have chosen a high risk lifestyle with severe consequences? That seems crazy.

Honestly that's calculus that our society refuses to ever look at anymore. Every life, no matter what is worth infinity tax dollars and any cost spread among the rest of the public to accommodate is zero. That's how we look at everything.

Special needs kid consumes most of the teacher resources of the rest of the classroom, well too bad everyone else the special needs kid has a 'right' to be 'included' with everyone else.

Every politician, bureaucrat, business, etc dreads the news story that charges that they didn't do enough to accommodate someone.

[GullFoss]

IMO, Kenney hits the mark when he basically tells the police to "do your ####ing job"

[Makarov]

Originally Posted by corporatejay

What is the recovery rate of people using heavy drugs like this? Like it's a nice story that we are all about tolerance and helping the "underprivileged" but if most of these people will be junkies and a social drain until the day they die, what are we really doing here? Sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens for persons who have chosen a high risk lifestyle with severe consequences? That seems crazy.

How are safe injection sites sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens? The whole purpose of them is to, hopefully, reduce the harm (to both users and the public) caused by intravenous drug use. Drug users will use drugs with or without a safe injection site.

I agree however that Calgary Police need to have a strategy for dealing with crime that will understandably increase in the areas around safe injection sites.

[CaptainCrunch]

Originally Posted by Makarov

How are safe injection sites sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens? The whole purpose of them is to, hopefully, reduce the harm (to both users and the public) caused by intravenous drug use. Drug users will use drugs with or without a safe injection site.

I agree however that Calgary Police need to have a strategy for dealing with crime that will understandably increase in the areas around safe injection sites.

I would look at the concept here, because it keeps sounding less like a safe injection site and more like a staffed needle pick up and these people aren't doing their thing on site and under supervision, but just taking needles and going elsewhere.


I think there's a harm and safety issue in terms of needles being left laying. I also think crime itself is a safety issue as we're talking about break ins, car thefts and physical violence as crimes.


I agree absolutely that the police have to do more in that area. But I wonder if more has to be done in terms of the overall strategy of the safe injection site?

[chemgear]

Originally Posted by corporatejay

What is the recovery rate of people using heavy drugs like this? Like it's a nice story that we are all about tolerance and helping the "underprivileged" but if most of these people will be junkies and a social drain until the day they die, what are we really doing here? Sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens for persons who have chosen a high risk lifestyle with severe consequences? That seems crazy.

I doubt they would want to compile/breakdown and press release those numbers, it likely wouldn't look good PR wise. I haven't been able to find any numbers glancing around for Calgary but Vancouver does give some high level data.

User statistics from January 1 – December 31, 2017
175,464 visits by 7,301 individuals (average of 24 times per individual)

For the fiscal year 2017/18 443 clients accessed Onsite, the adjoining detox treatment facility, with an average stay of 11 days.

[chemgear]

NPD and Alberta Health claims about Chumir:

https://www.albertahealthservices.ca...vised-faqs.pdf

Will supervised consumption services increase crime in the community?

Evidence from other supervised consumption services locations indicates that these services do not increase crime rates in areas surrounding the site.

Will supervised consumption services attract people who sell drugs?

Studies of supervised consumption services have shown that they improve public order and have no effect on criminal activity in the vicinity of the services.

[Igottago]

Originally Posted by chemgear

NPD and Alberta Health claims about Chumir:

https://www.albertahealthservices.ca...vised-faqs.pdf

Will supervised consumption services increase crime in the community?

Evidence from other supervised consumption services locations indicates that these services do not increase crime rates in areas surrounding the site.

Will supervised consumption services attract people who sell drugs?

Studies of supervised consumption services have shown that they improve public order and have no effect on criminal activity in the vicinity of the services.

So they claim the exact opposite of what is actually occurring. And also, what studies? How do they make a claim about evidence and studies and yet not provide any backup material or links?

[Locke]

Originally Posted by Cowboy89

Honestly that's calculus that our society refuses to ever look at anymore. Every life, no matter what is worth infinity tax dollars and any cost spread among the rest of the public to accommodate is zero. That's how we look at everything.

Special needs kid consumes most of the teacher resources of the rest of the classroom, well too bad everyone else the special needs kid has a 'right' to be 'included' with everyone else.

Every politician, bureaucrat, business, etc dreads the news story that charges that they didn't do enough to accommodate someone.

While I agree with some of what you're saying, it isnt a zero-sum game and it shouldnt have to be.

Politically speaking it isnt a cost/benefit analysis that anyone will even entertain and thats not an intelligent way of approaching the issue.

I dont believe that just because people are addicts that society should just give up on them or abandon them, but like with all things that arent working either a different approach should be considered or limits imposed?

Has letting the same people do this over and over again ad infinitum been a successful approach?

[Zarley]

Originally Posted by Igottago

So they claim the exact opposite of what is actually occurring. And also, what studies? How do they make a claim about evidence and studies and yet not provide any backup material or links?

The data used for those claims comes from Insite in Vancouver.

What they don't say is that Insite was opened in the DTES, which has long been infested with crime, drug-use, and anti-social behaviour. The activity was already concentrated in that area so stats did not go up.

In Calgary, thankfully we do not (or did not) have one area where this activity is concentrated. It has been spread out across the inner city, which is a good thing. This Chumir site has resulted in an unfortunate concentration of anti-social behaviour that should have been anticipated by authorities. I think the economic climate these past few years has created a significant overall increase in hard drug use as well.

[chemgear]

So basically, if you were the Downtown Eastside already, you wouldn't notice a difference.

If not, they'll turn you into it.


https://nationalpost.com/opinion/tri...f-emulating-it

Vancouver's drug strategy has been a disaster. Be very wary of emulating it

In recent decades, Vancouver has been concentrating more and more services in its Downtown Eastside. The result? Everything seems to be getting worse.

And honestly, it’s hard to see how the locals are wrong. While the strategy of harm reduction can indeed save the lives of addicts in the short term, it can destroy communities if used in isolation.

heft and violent crime in the Downtown Eastside have gone up since 2002. And as an overdose crisis sweeps Canada, Vancouver is its undisputed epicentre. Even with teams of naloxone-armed paramedics addressing a nightly rush of overdosed drug users, more than 100 people have died of overdoses in 2017 — with most of these occurring within the narrow borders of the Downtown Eastside.

And yet, all across the continent planners can be heard talking up Vancouver’s success on the addiction file.

They’re usually pointing to the success of Insite, which was established in 2003 as North America’s first safe injection site.

And Insite’s supporters are right; safe-injection sites are good at what they do. But they really only do one thing: prevent people from dying.

It does not seem to reduce crime. There is slim evidence to show that it reduces overall addiction rates. And it certainly doesn’t lead to livable neighbourhoods filled with healthy people.

Insite’s own website says that “supervised injection facilities can help people quit drugs” — but the data proving as much is slim. The two major studies that Insite references cover a limited time period, and only document an increase in admissions to detoxification. To date, there is no definitive, long-term data showing that Vancouver’s injection drug users are successfully getting clean and kicking drugs because of safe injection.

Meanwhile, a 2006 British Medical Journal study looked at the years before and after Insite’s opening and found “no substantial decrease in the rate of stopping injected drug use.” While Insite will provide referrals to drug treatment, they also aim to be “low barrier.” Site staff do not want to alienate patients by counselling or pressuring them to seek treatment.

Even for those who get into treatment, it is notoriously difficult to get clean on the Downtown Eastside. Anyone leaving detox steps back into a neighbourhood where are their friends are users, all their neighbours are users, and where the whole machinery of the community seems to be geared towards injection drug use. “Nobody can go through recovery here, for the most part, it’s just not possible,” Kate Gibson, executive director of WISH, a drop-in centre for survival sex workers, told the National Post in 2014.

Vancouver’s error was to see Insite’s success, and to then allow the surrounding neighbourhood to be increasingly shaped by the philosophy of harm reduction. For example, there’s the whimsically decorated crack-pipe vending machine. The city also dropped the Hastings Street speed limit to 30 km/h, to protect addicts who are unable to demarcate the road from a sidewalk.

There’s also a city hall-funded “street market” that — despite organizers’ fervent claims to the contrary — is well-known by locals to be a brazen hotspot for stolen goods. There are now more than 170 non-profits clustered in an area of only a few blocks, all devoted towards supporting an increasingly dense community of addicts. In a 2015 interview, longtime Downtown Eastside organizer Scott Clark referred to the growth of “a pipeline for vulnerable populations” that has become a “magnet over the years.”

“These service providers, and the government managers that keep funding these agencies, they refuse to look at the evidence that says putting these many vulnerable people in one building, in one community, is simply not healthy for anyone,” said Clark, executive director of the Aboriginal Live in Vancouver Enhancement Society.

The people who want to prevent more Downtown Eastsides all say the same thing: Do not try to address a drug problem by concentrating all your services on skid row. “You can’t just focus on harm reduction, you also have to focus on prevention, education and enforcement,” said Tom Stamatkis, the president of the Vancouver Police Union, in 2016.

[corporatejay]

Originally Posted by Zarley

The data used for those claims comes from Insite in Vancouver.

What they don't say is that Insite was opened in the DTES, which has long been infested with crime, drug-use, and anti-social behaviour. The activity was already concentrated in that area so stats did not go up.


In Calgary, thankfully we do not (or did not) have one area where this activity is concentrated. It has been spread out across the inner city, which is a good thing. This Chumir site has resulted in an unfortunate concentration of anti-social behaviour that should have been anticipated by authorities. I think the economic climate these past few years has created a significant overall increase in hard drug use as well.

Exactly. Open that safe injection site and yaletown and tell me it won't impact the crime around that area. JFC.

[GullFoss]

The NDP's extreme left-wing position with regard to the impact of this safe injection site could very much be the reason I vote UPC in the next election. The minister won't even recognize the impact to the residents.

[chemgear]

Well, they just rubber stamped the renewal of the site for another year just today.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by corporatejay

What is the recovery rate of people using heavy drugs like this? Like it's a nice story that we are all about tolerance and helping the "underprivileged" but if most of these people will be junkies and a social drain until the day they die, what are we really doing here? Sacrificing the health and safety of law abiding citizens for persons who have chosen a high risk lifestyle with severe consequences? That seems crazy.

I own property which is directly beside Chumir. The increase in crime and drop in reputation and quality of life/property value sucks, but I want to find a way to co-exist rather than say "no more safe injection sites, it's a failed concept".


While there are many who chose to take drugs at first, there are many who want off that train but cannot get off of it due to the addiction. For that reason, I was supportive of the safe injection site and it didn't bug me too much it was going to be at Chumir.

The problem is that the safe injection site isn't so much a safe injection site, but more like a convenient needle dispensary. Things went to hell in a hand basket and CPS + Government is turning a blind eye instead of looking for ways to fix the concept and allow better co-existence of the community and the "safe injection site". This pisses me off.


A crazy conversation I had with someone who was fed up with the issue was that we should be throwing more money at the problem, not less. The solution was to essentially offer a permanent solution. Hand some of these individuals who go to the safe injection site consistently over a period of several months $2,000 cash or fully paid recovery program (one time offer one or the other). For those who take the cash, you can hope they kill each other for it, or stop using forever with a smile on their face.

However, there are some who legitimately want to stop using but cannot by themselves, who may take the recovery program (which apparently are as expensive as $300-500 a day and the average stay is 3-4 months). Said persons in theory would recover and then be removed from the population. That's a pretty grim and screwed up way to think of things but I think the idea was to separate those that were trapped on the drug bandwagon by choice and those that were legitimately unable to get off by themselves.

I honestly don't know how to fix things. I just seem to know that it's not in the direction of the old status quo nor the current mess of the implementation of the safe injection site.

I truly am still hoping for a successful implementation of the safe injection site. It maddens me that both the safe injection site is a failure AND the community is in a mess. That's just stupid.

[Trojan97]

I saw a social media post from someone who works at Alpha House who claimed they are establishing another DOAP team that will focus strictly on the beltline. Interested to see how this may help the issue. Hopefully it's step one of many.

[Ped]

Originally Posted by DoubleF

The problem is that the safe injection site isn't so much a safe injection site, but more like a convenient needle dispensary. Things went to hell in a hand basket and CPS + Government is turning a blind eye instead of looking for ways to fix the concept and allow better co-existence of the community and the "safe injection site". This pisses me off.

So just curious, my town is far too small for something like this, but what exactly are they doing to get people off drugs? I assume they have the usual pamphlets and programs, but do they actually talk to people that come in and try to find ways to get them off, or do they just kind of give them a safe place to inject and a clean needle, give them a short talk about the issues with drugs, and send them on their way?

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Ped

So just curious, my town is far too small for something like this, but what exactly are they doing to get people off drugs? I assume they have the usual pamphlets and programs, but do they actually talk to people that come in and try to find ways to get them off, or do they just kind of give them a safe place to inject and a clean needle, give them a short talk about the issues with drugs, and send them on their way?

I haven't bothered to visit the site myself, but most of the information trickling out relating to the safe injection site seems to little of what you mentioned above is happening to help people get off drugs. Yeah, the info is there, but it's kinda like the coupons that are in front of supermarkets like Superstores before you walk in. Most people don't even notice it. Most of other information I have looked into not relating to this safe injection site seem to indicate something similar, that most of the programs/methods are either ineffective or completely overwhelmed to the point they are simply ineffective in denting the issue.

There's more information earlier in the thread, but many are annoyed that the set up was described like a safe injection site for users to have a safe place to use. Instead, the current iteration is more like a dispensary.

I might be exaggerating, but I feel like it's more like sticking those hand sanitizer dispensers in front of a clinic in the middle of a flu epidemic, as opposed to offering a flu shot at said clinic during said flu epidemic. The whole damn thing just seems like it was half assed.

I think arguably, it's at least a step towards a resolution in a situation which doesn't look easy to solve.

[DoubleF]

Originally Posted by Trojan97

I saw a social media post from someone who works at Alpha House who claimed they are establishing another DOAP team that will focus strictly on the beltline. Interested to see how this may help the issue. Hopefully it's step one of many.

That's pretty good news. However, most interaction I've had with Alpha house and Dream centre essentially show that both are overwhelmed due to lack of resources and the sheer amount of those who need help.

But that being said, thank you for reminding me of these groups. I think I will give the Red Cross a call soon so that I can cancel my donations to them and divert those donations to Alpha house and Dream centre instead.

[corporatejay]

Originally Posted by DoubleF

I haven't bothered to visit the site myself, but most of the information trickling out relating to the safe injection site seems to little of what you mentioned above is happening to help people get off drugs. Yeah, the info is there, but it's kinda like the coupons that are in front of supermarkets like Superstores before you walk in. Most people don't even notice it. Most of other information I have looked into not relating to this safe injection site seem to indicate something similar, that most of the programs/methods are either ineffective or completely overwhelmed to the point they are simply ineffective in denting the issue.

There's more information earlier in the thread, but many are annoyed that the set up was described like a safe injection site for users to have a safe place to use. Instead, the current iteration is more like a dispensary.

I might be exaggerating, but I feel like it's more like sticking those hand sanitizer dispensers in front of a clinic in the middle of a flu epidemic, as opposed to offering a flu shot at said clinic during said flu epidemic. The whole damn thing just seems like it was half assed.

I think arguably, it's at least a step towards a resolution in a situation which doesn't look easy to solve.

Chemgear's data suggests it well under 10%.

User statistics from January 1 – December 31, 2017
175,464 visits by 7,301 individuals (average of 24 times per individual)

For the fiscal year 2017/18 443 clients accessed Onsite, the adjoining detox treatment facility, with an average stay of 11 days.