It has long been an open secret in certain health-care circles that the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) will, from time to time, operate an unsanctioned drug-consumption site.
Unlike Insite, North America’s only government-approved supervised-injection facility (SIF), the VANDU sites run illegally. Usually occupying a spare room somewhere in the Downtown Eastside, these locations serve as relatively safe places for crack cocaine and heroin users to access clean equipment and consume drugs. They will sometimes remain open for months before shutting down.
Now an August 2015 paper authored by SFU researcher Ehsan Jozaghi has examined one such site and found that the illegal operations have been a good deal for Vancouver taxpayers.
“VANDU’s unsanctioned SIF establishment in the DTES saves taxpayers’ money,” reads the paper published in the academic journal Health & Justice. It explains that significant cost savings occur because consumption sites lower the transmission rates of diseases such as HIV and hepatitis C, thus saving health-care expenditures on treatment. For example, researchers estimated that one additional SIF site can run on $97,203 per year to avert 30 new HIV cases and 81 new incidents of hepatitis C.
The paper notes that Insite is operating at its maximum capacity and that efforts to establish additional SIFs have long stalled in Ottawa on account of opposition from the federal Conservative government.
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This article was originally published in print and online at Straight.com on September 9, 2015.