VANCOUVER - A scientist who has published several studies on the positive impact of Vancouver's safe-injection site is outraged that the author of a report has hailed the facility a failure without any evidence through medical research.
Dr. Thomas Kerr, a research scientist at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, said Thursday that a study in the new online Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice is merely a commentary about Insite, North America's first such facility.
"He writes opinion pieces, he doesn't do research," Kerr said of Colin Mangham, who authored the study published Wednesday.
Mangham has written two commentaries against harm reduction in the Canadian Medical Association Journal and the Canadian Journal of Public Health.
His most recent article is "not an opinion piece," he insisted. "It runs much deeper than that.
"I felt for the public, I felt that this is kind of a hoodwink here," he said of his decision to write his critical report of Insite.
Research by Kerr and his colleagues, published in international journals like the Lancet and the New England Medical Journal, suggests public drug use, publicly discarded syringes, and syringe sharing have decreased since the site opened.
But Mangham said Insite, where addicts inject heroin and cocaine under the supervision of a nurse, basically treats drug use as a right instead of the focus being placed on prevention.
"Treating drug use as simply a lifestyle option to seek ways to help people use drugs non-problematically is not really defencible scientifically or socially."
Mangham is a board member with the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, which opposes Insite and is headed by former Conservative MP Randy White.
White has praised Mangham's report, saying it shows Insite has been wrongly billed as a success.
But critics say the former politician has been against so-called harm reduction approaches to dealing with drug overdoses and the spread of diseases like HIV through shared needles before Insite opened as a pilot project over three years ago.
The Conservative government will decide at the end of the year whether Insite can continue to operate legally by remaining exempt from Canada's drug laws.
The licence on the site was due to expire last September but federal Health Minister Tony Clement said the government would allow it stay open longer so more studies could be done to determine if it is helping to get addicts off drugs.
Mangham said he has a PhD in community health and the credentials to critically analyze studies as a former professor in the school of health professions at Dalhousie University in Halifax.
"The fact is, their science wasn't good," he said of the 13 published studies by Kerr and his colleagues about the effectiveness of Insite.
However, he refused to say which organization funded his research, although he added it wasn't White's group.
"It's a highly sensitive issue," he said of not disclosing his funding source. "It is Canadian, a highly credible, major, national organization."
But Kerr said credible journals require authors to state where their research money came from in case of a conflict of interest.
