Martinuk: Some insight into Insite – the data don’t hold up
By Susan Martinuk, Calgary HeraldOctober 14, 2011
Susan Martinuk’s Photo
On Sept. 30, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that Insite, Vancouver’s drug injection site for addicts, is exempt from the provisions of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. The site can therefore continue to provide drug addicts with a safe place to inject themselves with illicitly obtained heroin and cocaine; that is, they can continue to shoot themselves into pharmaceutical oblivion on the taxpayers’ dollar.
As has been widely reported by the media, the Court supported this ruling by reasoning that: “Insite saves lives. Its benefits have been proven.”
Thus, Insite advocates and its media supporters are claiming that the medical science they cite has won out over the ridiculous ideology of those who think society has a moral responsibility to help addicts by providing them with a second chance at life and a way out of addiction.
But it’s highly misleading for the media or Insite to state that scientific fact has gained any kind of victory at all. Facts can always be twisted to suit one’s purposes and, in this case, it’s clear that scientific contradictions – not facts – reign supreme. In the end, it’s apparent that ideology drives those who favour harm reduction just as much as those who oppose it. It just depends if your ideology leans toward helping addicts or giving in to their need for a fix.
Last week, in these same pages, Peter Stockland challenged erroneous statements that have been perpetrated by the media
in the wake of the Supreme Court judgment. For example, the ruling doesn’t guarantee that the injection facility can now operate permanently. Rather, it states that “the granting of a permanent constitutional exemption” was not appropriate and it allows the health minister to withdraw the exemption “should changed circumstances at Insite so require.”
Further, while the media is reporting that the ruling establishes legal grounds for the creation of injection sites in other Canadian cities, the ruling clearly states that further decisions about applications for exemptions are up to the health minister and his “discretion.” So the judgment is hardly an invitation for drug injection facilities to proliferate across the country.
But nowhere has there been more confusion and misinformation than in the media’s interpretation of the medical data that supposedly underlies the legal decision. In the past days, much has been made of a scientific article on Insite published in The Lancet this spring. It claims that Insite reduced drug overdose deaths in the area around Insite by 35 per cent, and by nine per cent in the rest of Vancouver.
But those numbers simply don’t mesh with the raw data available from the British Columbia coroner’s office or an analysis of The Lancet article commissioned by the Drug Prevention Network of Canada and REAL Women of Canada. Rather than showing a decrease in the deaths in the area around Insite, the analysis found that the number of drug overdoses increased between 2002 and 2007 (note that Insite was established in 2003).
The data from the B.C coroner’s office show 49 illicit drug deaths in 2002, followed by 51, 67, 55, 54 and 56 in each of the years that followed until 2007.
The Lancet analysis further states that 41 per cent of B.C.’s overdose fatalities are not injection-related and are therefore not relevant to the impact by Insite on fatal drug overdoses.
A further contradiction to the 35 per cent figure comes from a 2008 expert advisory committee that evaluated Insite for the Canadian government: It calculated that Insite saved 1.08 lives per year. That’s it – at a cost to taxpayers of approximately $3 million per year.
There are about 5,000 addicts in Vancouver’s downtown eastside (DTES), yet less than 10 per cent use Insite for all injections. In fact, the expert advisory report showed that the injections at Insite account for only five per cent of all drug injections in the DTES, and 18 per cent of Insite users accounted for 86 per cent of all Insite visits. In other words, a small number of addicts are making use of Insite for only some of their injections.
Al Arsenault is a former Vancouver police officer who walked a beat through the DTES. Rather than support Insite, he is a member of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada and Odd Squad Productions, a group that makes films based on life in the DTES as a means of promoting drug prevention and treatment.
In considering the Supreme Court decision and the abundant contradictions in medical evidence, he says, “These harm reduction follies are the longest-standing failed social experiments that I know of. Shame on us.
. This is quite the legacy to cheer about – the continuing loss of human potential all facilitated by statistic twisted researchers .”
Indeed. The Supreme Court may have made a legal determination about Insite, but there’s no clear victory for science and no clear science to back up its comment that the “benefits have been proven.” If anything, the benefits remain highly doubtful. The legal ruling does nothing to change that.
Susan Martinuk’s column
appears every other week.
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