Vancouver, the city with the highest number of drug overdose fatalities in Canada, may soon have a safe place for local addicts to use their drug of choice. Similar safe sites are already in use in several European cities. He says his organization will open an injection site by Valentine's Day, with or without city hall's blessing. He's not opposed in principle to safe injection sites. But injection sites need informed public support behind them, he insists.
Harm reduction is clearly the most hot-button of the proposals being considered.
Supporters call it a pragmatic approach to minimizing the consequences of drug use without requiring abstinence. Similarly, harm reduction assumes that some level of addiction within the population is inevitable. He accuses harm reduction advocates of putting the safety of addicts ahead of the safety of the larger community. But at Main and Hastings, in Vancouver's downtown East Side, the larger community seems to have disappeared. In broad daylight in the middle of what might elsewhere be called the workday, young drug dealers in high-tops, baggy jeans, and down jackets, stand on corners and in doorways, hawking their wares only slightly more discreetly than sellers in a farmers' market.