"InSite has not had a negative impact on public safety or public health. Drug trafficking and crime in downtown Vancouver hadn't increased, nor had relapses by drug addicts, while lives had been saved." (MacCharles, 2011) said by the judges of the Supreme Court of Canada. Injection drug use is a growing problem for Canada, especially for the province of Vancouver. Similar projects have been successfully implemented in a number of European countries. Safe injection sites will have significant benefit for both drug users and the community and therefore should be utilized in more places. Drug users are vulnerable to a lot of health problems while injecting themselves, not only does it affect them in the long run but it can also have some negative affects on the community around them but with the help of safe injection sites the users are able to get assistance with their problems and the community is able to benefit to. Canada should continue to allow the use of safe injection sites.
Health Problems.
People who inject themselves with drugs put themselves at serious health risks, such as fatal and non-fatal overdoses and diseases such as HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C. Canada as a country has a duty to reduce the harm and protect them and that is exactly what they did. Vancouver in the 1990s had high rates of overdose deaths and that led to the making of the first safe injection site in North America. The safe injection site, InSite was placed in Downtown Eastside, a community where you can get any kind of drug for cheap. The area around it is also filled with low cost housing, an enormous amount of homeless people and a lot of those people have drug related disorders. Downtown Eastside is one of the poorest and worst neighbourhoods in Canada. Appendix 1 shows the overdoses occurring 500m of the SIF and further than 500m of the SIF. It shows that the percentage of overdoses occurring to people who live 500m+ from it is drastically greater then the ones closer to the safe injection site.
