KAMLOOPS —With discarded needles still littering Kamloops streets, those at the forefront of a grassroots needle buyback program are gearing up for the winter ahead.
Caroline King and Dennis Giesbrecht started the program in June, and since then, have collected nearly 11,000 needles at five cents a piece.
In terms of how much their initiative has cost, King says a couple of thousand dollars has been spent so far.
“The majority of that money was on things like Gatorade, socks, backpacks, things to get people over to us so we could introduce ourselves,” she explains. “You can’t just holler out ‘Hey do you have any sharps to sell?’, but in actual sharps, it was $500.”
While the needle buyback program has stirred up some discussion in council chambers and with the Interior Health Authority, King says lately they’ve been moving along on their own.
“I know we’re seeing less needles on the streets right now because it’s colder out,” she explains. “We’ve seen the closure of JUMP, and we lose our ground zero, that place where we make those connections… but the reality is the camps are full of needles, and the back alleys are full of needles again.”
The pair’s concern is what will happen in the spring when the snow melts and needles make their way into beach and park areas once again.
“I care because I live in Kamloops, I have children in the town, and I want to be able to walk down the beach,” Giesbrecht says. “I mean it’s terrifying enough to have kids down on the beach, I heard stories last year of dogs being poked on the beach. I mean it’s not just people that are impacted by this.”
Giesbrecht says the idea of creating a needle task force has surfaced, however those who see first-hand how many sharps are left out think the solution lies with the agencies who provide the supplies.
“What I’d like to see is the agencies that hand out the needles take more accountability in cleaning them up,” he says. “If you’re a nightclub, and there’s beer bottles outside in your parking lot, you’re responsible to clean that up. So how are these agencies that hand out these needles not responsible in some form to clean them back up? It boggles the mind.”
As for what kind of success their program has had, King points to how they’ve seen their method change patterns in drug users.
“I’ve got one girl that doesn’t take the money anymore, but she brings them back, which is so shocking to me that she’ll do that.”
King says the buyback gives users extra incentive to find needles.
“That helps them look around for what their friends have left, it helps them look around in corners where we might not know where to go. But I don’t think a task force is neccessarily going to work, because we’re never going to go into those spaces they go, it’s what you can’t see that scares me.”
Giesbrecht says paying for all the needles throughout the city would be far cheaper than trying to pay for a full task force to go out and pick them up.
“We don’t need a $150,000 task force, I think taxpayers are a little bit tired of that — $13-15,000 we pay to get these all back, and if we start buying them back at the locations where they’re being distributed, its a win-win.”
As for what they’d like to see eventually happen, Giesbrecht says it goes back to the services that provide the needles in the first place.
“Best case scenario is the agencies that hand them out start taking responsibility, and get them back where they’re distributed. Whether it’s a needle exchange, or a needle buyback, something to start accounting for these hundreds of thousands of needles that are handed out.”
