Canadian govt assists more than 600 people per day in getting high

June 2, 2008

NORTHERN EXPOSURECourt mandates needles for addictsJudge says NOT providing injection site is unconstitutional

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The injection facility at Vancouver's InSite

British Columbia Supreme Court Justice Ian Pitfield ruled that the Canadian government cannot shut down an experimental, federally-funded facility that helps drug users shoot up safely.

Instead, said the judge, Canada needs to rewrite its drug laws to allow for the facility.

The Vancouver Safe Injection Site (called "InSite") was opened in 2003 as North America’s first legal supervised injection site, a place drug addicts could go and receive free, clean needles and medical supervision to inject their own drugs.

Canada's federal health department opened and funded the site and granted it a temporary immunity from federal drug laws until the effects of the site could be determined.

Since then, the government has spent $2.7 million to assist more than 600 people per day in getting high.

Canada Health Minister Tony Clement appointed a commission in 2006 to evaluate the center's effectiveness. After the commission found no evidence that InSite was reducing HIV, crime, or drug addiction rates, Clement chose not to renew InSite's exemption from federal drug laws, essentially ending the program.

Justice Pitfield, however, ruled that Canada's federal drug laws had no constitutional right to interfere with InSite, since the facility was providing valuable medical care.

His ruling stated that the federal law threatens the security of addicts because it "forces the user who is ill from addiction to resort to unhealthy and unsafe injection." The law, he said, "denies the addict access to a health care facility where the risk of morbidity associated with infectious disease is diminished."

Justice Pitfield further concluded that portions of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act, by so interfering with an addicts "right" to health care, were in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, a document similar to the U.S. Bill of Rights. He then gave Ottawa until June 30, 2009, to rectify the law.

Dean Wilson, a longtime heroin addict and one of the litigants involved in the case, saw the decision as a victory for the little guy. "Hey, we won," he told The Vancouver Sun. "A couple of junkies knocked off the PM."

"This says addicts are Canadian citizens too," Wilson said. "The most conservative judge in B.C. got that we are real people and we have the right to have a normal life."

In a press conference after his decision was overturned by the court, Clement explained why he's still opposed to continuing the InSite facility: "Our government believes that the best way to deal with the health issues of drug addicts is to offer treatment and indeed to prevent people from getting on to illicit drugs in the first place...We don't consider it the best health outcome to keep people in a position where they continue to use illicit drugs."

Clement has since publicly asked the nation's minister of justice to appeal the court's decision.

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