The federal government is planning to introduce legislation that will give Canadians more of a say on where supervised drug injection facilities should be allowed to open.
Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq says the legislation will be unveiled Thursday and will clarify the rules for opening new sites.
Vancouver is currently the only city in Canada that has supervised drug injection facilities: Insite, the country’s first such site; and the Dr. Peter AIDS Foundation, which offers safe injection service to its clients.
Both facilities supply drug addicts with clean needles and a safe place to inject. Clients are also provided with health information, counselling, and referrals to various services, including an in-house detox and treatment centre.
As many as 800 drug users a day use Insite’s 12 booths to inject drugs. The facility, which has been operating since 2003, has been hailed by advocates as a success in reducing drug overdoses and the spread of disease.
Insite has been allowed to operate through exemptions from federal drug laws that allow the site's clients to avoid facing drug possession charges.
The Conservative government is opposed to supervised injection sites, arguing the sites only legitimize and encourage drug addiction. It attempted several times to allow that exemption to lapse.
But the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in 2011 that the exemption could not be denied if there was a demonstrated need for the facility.
The court ordered the government to abandon its attempts to close the facility, saying they felt convinced that the experiment of Insite "has proven successful" and that the site was indeed saving lives without increasing crime in the surrounding area.
The top court also noted the site has won the approval of Vancouver police, the city and provincial governments.
Following that ruling, Quebec said that it was open to opening similar sites and that it was accepting proposals from organizations hoping to open safe injection sites.
But the process appears to have stalled since then, with officials in Montreal arguing about whether such sites should be stand-alone facilities or run out of hospitals.
A report earlier this spring by the Centre for Research on Inner City Health at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto concluded that city, as well as Ottawa, could also benefit from supervised drug injection sites.
The report said demand for such facilities is high in the two cities, which have an estimated 9,000 and 3,000 injection drug users respectively.
When asked about the recommendation, Ontario's Health Minister Deb Matthews responded that the province was not planning to pursue such sites at this time.
