Health Minister mulling over mobile safe injection site

Sep 23, 2016 | 2:33 PM

KAMLOOPS — A Kamloops safe injection site has been on the radar of health officials for some time now, as the Province continues to look for ways to get a handle on the drug overdose crisis. 

City council has approved the proposal for a safe injection site, but businesses on both sides of the river have voiced concern over having such a facility in their neighbourhoods. 

Now, a program that’s been implemented in Europe is being considered as a possible solution here.

WATCH: Full report by Jill Sperling

Health Minister Terry Lake says his ministry and Interior Health are in talks regarding the potential of a mobile safe injection site.

“It certainly would, I think, serve the needs of Kamloops better than having one site in some ways,” Lake said, “and you’re taking the service to where people are and I think it gets around, in some ways the concern about the neighbourhood and having it in one location versus another location. I think it actually, in many ways, would serve the population that it needs to better.” 

There is currently no such program in Canada, which means there are a lot of little details that would need to be worked out, such as where the site will be, and when.

“I think there would be a schedule involved and people on the street and the people connected to them on the street, service providers, they know for instance what services are available, what meals are available, when they’re available, where they are, and so it would be no different with a mobile consumption site service,” Lake explained, “the schedule would be well known, people connected on the street and others that serve them would know that very well.”

With no Canadian mobile sites to look to as a model, Interior Chemical Dependency Office founder Dr. Mandy Manak is unsure of how successful the program could be in Kamloops.
 
“It has a potential to help some people,” she said, “but I think if we consider Vancouver Downtown Eastside as ground zero for the addicted patient population, we have to remember that not all our patients are Downtown Eastside clients. There are some, and definitely we need to support them, but I don’t know how that service would work here because there are no mobile sites, so I really can’t comment on the cost or the effect of it.” 

Due to an alarmingly high overdose fatality rate, the Province has been under a public health emergency for six months. There were 488 overdose deaths to the end of August this year, 23 of those deaths occurred in Kamloops. 

Manak says there’s no certainty a safe injection site would curb those numbers.

“If we open up multiple injection sites it is my prediction that the fatal overdose rate is not going to go down,” Manak said. “Right now we’re dealing with a fentanyl crisis, we’ve had three confirmed cases of W18 in our own clinic, there’s carfentanil, so when you deal with it as putting out this fire, then there’s another fire. The overdose rate is going to go up unless we can get people into stable, sustainable recovery that is actually cost effective as well.”