As you may know, the BC Supreme Court recently ruled that the application of Canada's Controlled Drugs and Substances Act in regards to InSite, Vancouver's Supervised Injection site is inconsistent wi

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: July 7, 2008
CONTACT: Rev. Harry Herbert, Executive Director, UnitingCare NSW & Tony Trimingham, founder of the Damien Trimingham Foundation. To organise an interview, please call Mardi Stewart on 0402 231 142.

Groundbreaking founder says goodbye

It's been a long and arduous journey for Dr Ingrid van Beek who as the medical director of Australia's first Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) has put her heart and soul into this ground-breaking public health initiative over the past eight years. Today, in an historic announcement, Dr van Beek announces her resignation as its inaugural Medical Director.

"It's been a great privilege to work in a field that I have such a strong commitment and passion for. My only disappointment is that the MSIC continues to operate on a trial basis," says Dr van Beek.

The Kings Cross service received a four-year trial extension by the NSW Government in June last year, making it a ten and a half year scientific trial.

"It's important the MSIC is judged on its health outcomes and it is now well-established the MSIC has been effective in reducing the various drug-related harms associated with street-based injecting to both individual drug users and the greater community," says Dr van Beek.

The statistics speak for themselves:

- 80 per cent of long term local Kings Cross residents and 68 percent of local business managers support the MSIC.

- Over 10,000 injecting drug users have registered to use the MSIC to date.

- More than 200 injecting episodes occur at MSIC every day i.e. in a clinical setting where in the event of a medical emergency eg overdose, specially trained registered nurses provide prompt and effective resuscitation. These injecting episodes would have otherwise occurred in unsupervised, often public and squalid circumstances in the local environs where timely help is in the lap of the gods.

- 2,458 drug overdoses have been successfully treated onsite in the past seven years.

- Ambulance callouts to heroin overdoses in the area have decreased by 80 percent thereby freeing Ambulance services to attend other medical emergencies in the area.

- MSIC staff have referred drug users to other services including drug treatment and rehabilitation programs on more than 7,000 occasions to date.

"One of the highlights of my time spent at the MSIC is seeing first hand staff helping drug dependent users who are often in desperate personal circumstances and leading socially isolated lives. I am humbled to know we have helped these people get their lives back on track." says Dr van Beek.

"My one hope is that the MSIC's trial status is revisited prior to the next State election. The MSIC's apparently endless trial status is a barrier to its integration with the rest of the public health system affecting continuity of care, workforce development and staff morale, especially as the end of each trial period draws near. It also ensures that the service remains politicised; the work we do is too important to be subject to partisan politics," says Dr van Beek.

Rev. Harry Herbert, Executive Director, UnitingCare NSW says without the insight, personal dedication, political acumen, tenacity and determination of Dr van Beek, the MSIC would not have succeeded as it has.

"Ingrid made the dream a reality. She played an integral part in establishing the MSIC. She has been an inspiration to the staff, clients, businesses and community members associated with the MSIC."

"Ingrid is congratulated and should be recognised and admired for her work in preventing and reducing drug-related harm and communicable diseases amongst one of society's most marginalised groups - injecting drug users," says Rev Herbert.

Dr van Beek was recently inducted into the National Drug and Alcohol Awards Honour Roll for her tireless and significant contribution to the drug and alcohol field over many years. The Awards are a collaborative effort of the Ted Noffs Foundation, The Australian Drug Foundation, The Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia and the Australian National Council on Drugs.

Dr van Beek is returning to her original post as the full time Director of the Kirketon Road Centre in Kings Cross. Dr Marianne Jauncey, a public health physician, will take over as the Medical Director of the MSIC in the coming weeks. Dr Jauncey started her public health career working at the clinical coalface at the nearby Kirketon Road Centre, so she is well placed to take on this important role.

Like the rest of inner city America, Bridgeport, Connecticut's 130th District has for decades been ground zero in the war on drugs.

A think-tank established by the Scottish parliament and tasked with looking at new approaches to drug policy has issued a report calling for radical changes in the way Scotland deals with the damag

In a ruling that stunned and very pleasantly surprised advocates for Vancouver's Insite safe injection site, the British Columbia Supreme Court Tu

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The Drug Czar's blog has been very concerned about harm reduction lately. They've taken the counterintuitive position of opposing efforts to save the lives of drug users, which seems like a strange choice. Now I understand why: they think harm reduction is the opposite of what it actually is.

These so-called "harm reduction" strategies are poor public policy because their underlying philosophy involves giving up on those who can successfully recover from drug addiction. [PushingBack.com]

This is wrong for a very simple reason: you cannot recover from addiction if you're dead. Harm reduction programs are not an alternative to treatment, rather they go hand in hand. Harm reduction keeps people healthy and alive, thereby creating opportunities for them to subsequently recover from addiction.

We could do nothing. That would be "giving up." We could ask drug addicts to either quit or die. That would be "giving up." Instead, harm reduction activists have taken to the streets and attacked this problem directly. They've studied the leading causes of death among drug users and created programs to reduce those casualties. That's the opposite of giving up.

Just pretend for a moment that you're cruel and you want drug users to die in large numbers. How would you go about it? Well, you would begin by eliminating regulated distribution so that users are forced to obtain unsafe products from criminals on the street. You would reduce access to clean needles in order to spread AIDS. You would enforce criminal sanctions against users so that they're afraid to seek help. And you would lobby aggressively against anyone who's studied the problem and proposed programs to reduce AIDS and overdoses.

Now I'm not saying the Drug Czar wants to kill people. I'm just saying he presides over a policy that is perfectly tailored to achieve that outcome. And he dares to suggest that the people out there working with addicts and saving lives are the ones who've given up.

[Courtesy of the Harm Reduction Coalition]

By changing San Francisco, we change the world

A major part of addressing the expanding HIV/AIDS and overdose mortality rates in the United States is good public policy. The legacy of democracy is that when elected officials falter on implementing public policies that save lives, the public itself must step forward and urge those officials to take a stand.

We need 200 signatures by December from organizations and individuals living or working in San Francisco on a petition that will be delivered to the desk of Mayor Gavin Newsom, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, and the San Francisco Department of Health Director Mitchell Katz demanding that our city create a legal safer injection facility to reduce the number of deaths by overdose and to curb the transmission of HIV and Hepatitis C.

Your activism does make a difference. With your support we were able to beat back an amendment in Congress by conservative South Carolina senator Jim DeMint that sought to ban all federal funding from any city that chose to slow the spread of HIV/AIDS and save lives through the creation of a safe injection center.

Join our petition to Mayor Newsom and help to save lives. Visit our website and sign our online petition today.

http://www.democracyinaction.org/dia/organizations/HRC/petition.jsp?peti...

Other nations around the world have built 65-safer injection facilities in twenty-seven cities and eight nation, let's make San Francisco the first city in the U.S. to create one and begin a national trend that starts putting lives above politics.

Hilary McQuie, Western Regional Director

Harm Reduction Coalition
www.harmreduction.org
mcquie@harmreduction.org

An amendment to the Labor-HHS-Education appropriations bill that would have barred the dispersal of federal funds from those departments to any city that opened a safe injection site for drug users