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What's The Evidence That Supervised Drug Injection Sites Save Lives?
Critics say supervised injection sites encourage drug use and bring crime to surrounding communities. Proponents argue that they save lives and can help people in addiction reconnect with society and get health services. [...] But what does evidence say? If the policy goal is to save lives and eventually curb opioid addiction, do these sites work? It's a tricky question to answer, although many of these sites have been studied for years.
At least 100 supervised injection sites operate around the world, mainly in Europe, Canada and Australia. Typically, drug users come in with their own drugs and are given clean needles and a clean, safe space to consume them. Staff are on hand with breathing masks and naloxone, the overdose antidote, and to provide safer injection advice and information about drug treatment and other health services.
But most have grown out of community and grassroots efforts, according to Peter Davidson, a researcher specializing in harm reduction at the University of California San Diego who is researching an underground supervised injection site [open, DOI: 10.1016/j.amepre.2017.06.010] [DX] in the United States. They lack big budgets for comprehensive services or for conducting high level evaluations, he says. Still, he says the research – both "the grey" and the robust - point to the benefits, especially in preventing deaths among society's most vulnerable. No death has been reported in an injection site. A 2014 review of 75 studies [DOI: 10.1016/j.drugalcdep.2014.10.012] [DX] concluded such places promote safer injection conditions, reduce overdoses and increase access to health services. Supervised injection sites were associated with less outdoor drug use, and they did not appear to have any negative impacts on crime or drug use.
[...] However, in another review of studies [DOI: 10.1016/j.drugpo.2018.06.018] [DX] published in August in the International Journal of Drug Policy, the researchers, criminologists from the University of South Wales in the United Kingdom, found that the evidence for supervised injection is not as strong as previously thought. Only eight studies met the researchers' standards for high quality design. And of those, the findings on the effectiveness of supervised injection were uncertain, with no effect on overdose mortality or needle sharing. "Nobody should be looking at this literature making confident conclusions in either direction," says Keith Humphreys, an addiction researcher and psychiatry professor at Stanford University who wasn't involved in the study.
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(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @11:59PM (8 children)
Garbage data.
Let me give you some cold, hard, data from the morgue.
In Vancouver, BC last year, there were over 1,500 overdose deaths. Not overdoses; deaths. The overdose count is at least 10x that but most go unreported.
In Vancouver, BC last year, there were ZERO deaths in Insite, the supervised injection site. There were over 100,000 uses there in 2017.
The cost to run is approximately $500,000/year. The cost for a hospital to handle an incoming opioid overdose is $2,000-$100,000 but for severe cases the mean is probably around $25,000 to the Canadian system.
If 1% of those uses would've overdosed (conservative, given fentanyl prevalence), the 1,000 hospital visits would cost an estimated $25,000,000. Or a paltry $2m if they're the very best case scenario.
So. Human lives are being saved. Quality of life is improved for those persons. Useful data for society is gathered by Insite. The cost to society to provide medical care is net lower. Needle sharing is 0% at Insite.
So when they conclude "no effect on overdose mortality or needle sharing" I can tell you they haven't looked at the cold, hard data behind Insite, and I call big fat bullshit.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @12:19AM (1 child)
You forgot to mention that each junkie "saved" means another pile of shit and a gallon of urine dumped onto your property. Oh, and your car broken into. Again. Junkies are shit-stains of society and getting/using drugs should not be made easier for them. Junkies steal from their own families. Junkies destroy communities and wreck entire neighborhoods.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @12:31AM
Exactly. What Vancouver needs is a site that gives away fentanyl for free to junkies (and junkie-lovers like the OP). In fact, there's a charity that I would gladly donate to. Society for a Scum-Free Vancouver.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @12:55AM (1 child)
Sorry, your "cold, hard data" do not come from an experiment meeting our standards for high-quality design, so they don't count.
The war on drugs will continue apace.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @07:57AM
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
— John Ehrlichman, to Dan Baum[41][42][43] for Harper's Magazine[44] in 1994, about President Richard Nixon's war on drugs, declared in 1971.[45][46]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday September 09 2018, @09:59PM (1 child)
Reminds a guy that in Oslo, that is Norway, there was a "hilarious" incident when a second such site was opened.
Where as the first site had been located in the "seedier" parts of the city, this new site were closer to the affluent neighborhoods. End result was that suddenly they had incidents of someone dressed in expensive clothing, driving and expensive car, would stop by briefly to inject a dose of their stimulant of choice before heading off to the office or something.
While the individual identities were withheld, as was part of the policy of these sites, it got reported in the media in general terms. Not long after, all media coverage of these sites went quiet and one would not be surprised if their funding had been withdrawn...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @10:03PM
Addicts come in all stripes. Some addicts are high functioning. Some coke addicts shoot up daily before work. So they want to do it safely, and are condemned? It's foolish to say that a car and job means the person is doing well; does such a person not also deserve support through addiction? Should we only care for the homeless, and not for those not yet on the street? A stitch in time saving nine is what this is *all about!*
(Score: 2) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Monday September 10 2018, @06:54PM (1 child)
And with 0% needle sharing you have greatly reduced (not zero) percent risk of developing needle-transmissible diseases. So you can get savings that you can only measure over time (although one could probably predict what the savings would be).
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday September 11 2018, @09:58PM
Yeah - the big one is simply getting infected at the site of repeated injections. Good point.