Needle Point and Counter Point
Local Injection Site to Open After Syringe Exchange Closure
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Montreal and Quebec City may soon be emulating a controversial Vancouver safe drug-injection site program, but another local program aimed at preventing drug-related health problems has seen its provincial funding cut.
“To responsibly do a needle exchange [program], it’s important to have staff that can support and sit down one-on-one with clients and talk to them about safer use beyond just giving needles.”
-Juniper Belshaw
According to a press release from the office of Quebec Minister of Health Yves Bolduc, the minister has “spoken with Cactus Montreal [about the] conditions necessary for the establishment of a supervised injection service in Quebec, including the need to have a real consensus for such a project.”
Cactus is an outreach and education centre in downtown Montreal that describes itself as an “autonomous, nonprofit organization, which helps persons who use illicit drugs, or those with potentially risky sexual behaviour, to reduce the risks associated with those practices while improving their quality of life.”
One service already offered at Cactus is a safe needle-exchange program, where users can trade their used syringes for clean ones.
While Cactus may be operating as a safe injection site as early as April, another similar outreach service recently had to cut back its outreach. Head & Hands, located on Sherbrooke St. W. in Notre-Dame-de-Grâce, had to get rid of two street workers in August after its provincial funding was cut by $75,000.
“They did mobile harm-reduction in NDG, so they would go support clients in parks, metros, bars,” said Head & Hands’ Juniper Belshaw. “They were able to go to people’s apartments, group homes, youth centres, hotels, massage parlours and in those spaces they talked a lot about harm reduction, so they gave information on safer drug use and safer sex.
“They also ran a clean needle exchange and gave safe inhalation kits as well as tens of thousands of condoms a year.”
Belshaw noted that, while they are still able to hand out condoms on-site, the drug-related materials were no longer available.
“To responsibly do a needle exchange [program], it’s important to have staff that can support and sit down one-on-one with clients and talk to them about safer use beyond just giving needles,” he said.
Cactus’ director of community organization and outreach, Jean-Francois Mary, said he was concerned about what the loss of Head & Hands street workers would mean for the NDG area, citing increased austerity measures in the neighbourhood.
He said that the reason Cactus is able to maintain its operations and open the supervised injection site, while Head & Hands has to cut back, is because the funding is coming from a different organization in the Ministry of Health.
“In general we only receive funding for prevention of STDs, but for a safe injection site, dependency and substance abuse, the funding should come from the sector in the Ministry of Health [that deals with drug dependence].”
A Sept. 30 ruling from the Supreme Court of Canada marked the end of the eight-year-long court battle over the legality of Vancouver’s Insite safe injection clinic. The clinic provides clean needles and rooms where clients are able to inject pre-bought illicit drugs. It also provides health care services, which its website claims has successfully treated all 1,418 overdoses that have occurred since its opening in 2003. It shares a building with Onsite, a detox centre staffed with counselors, nurses and doctors that help clients aiming to end their drug addiction.
While the Cactus project is still in its infancy, the Quebec government has expressed public support, with a press release stating, “This ruling shows drug addiction is a disease and that supervised injection sites can save lives.”
Though Cactus is so far the only site named by Bolduc in Montreal, he has also approached Point de Repères in Quebec City to set up a similar facility. Mary expressed hope that the supervised injection initiative will eventually have more chapters in Montreal.
“We won’t be the only promoter in Montreal and we don’t want to be the only promoter in Montreal,” he said. “The context is really different from the Vancouver downtown site. The context is much closer to cities around Europe, where people are scattered and therefore we don’t want to have one central place, but multiple places.”
Mary added that there is much work to be done before Cactus can open as a supervised injection site, including educating the public in the area about what the facility does, organizing and training nurses, setting protocols for dealing with emergencies and other contingencies.
Bolduc ended his press release by saying “Since the supervised injection services can represent an additional tool to fight against the transmission of blood-borne infections, to reduce the harm associated with misuse of drugs by injection, in addition to having several health benefits of people with a drug addiction, I will follow with attention the progress of [Cactus.]”
What that means for places like Head & Hands remains unclear, however—at least for the time being.
