harm reduction

Success of Insite hailed on international Harm Reduction Day

Posted on Wed, May 7, 2014 - 12:00am

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Today is International Harm Reduction Day and advocates in B.C. are celebrating.

Vancouver is home to Insite, the first legal supervised injection site in North America. There is also a second safe injection site in Vancouver, at the Dr. Peter Centre in the west end.

Insite opened in 2003 and its existence has been unsuccessfully challenged several times by the federal Conservative government.

Opioid overdose tool is harm-reduction at its best

Posted on Tue, Apr 15, 2014 - 11:00am

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Eric Holder, U.S. Attorney-General, said it best when he called the soaring rates of opioid-related deaths an “urgent and growing public-health crisis.”

High-profile deaths such as that of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman attract all the attention, but the reality is that more than 100 Americans a day die of accidental drug overdoses. That’s more people than are murdered or than die in car crashes – and many of the 38,000 ODs a year are preventable. At least 16,000 of those deaths are related to misuse of opioids, everything from heroin to OxyContin.

Study Reveals Decline in HIV Cases in Vancouver Drug Addicts

Posted on Mon, Jul 22, 2013 - 8:08pm

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drugs, addiction, Insite, harm reduction, HIV, Dr. Thomas Kerr

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Harm reduction has resulted to seek a decline in illicit drug use. It has improved public safety as once Ground Zero for an HIV and overdose epidemic claimed many lives, according to a 15-year study of drug use in Vancouver's impoverished Downtown Eastside.