Medicine Hat HIV Community Link group hopeful for safe-injection site in city
By Mo Cranker on May 4, 2017.
mcranker@medicinehatnews.com
A safe-injection site could be coming to Medicine Hat.
Though it is still very early on in the process, HIV Community Link executive director Leslie Hill says this is something communities around Alberta could be seeing over the course of the next year or so.
“Right now we have a researcher in Medicine Hat working on creating a survey to get to drug users,” she said. “We are doing this in response to a rise in opioid use across the province and we are trying to be proactive with this.”
Hill says the survey will be all about getting information on what drug users feel they need.
“We’re hoping to hear from about 200 people in the community to see what they think they need,” she said. “The survey is just one of the steps, we also will be looking at things like crime statistics, HIV and Hepatitis C rates and overdose statistics.”
The province of Alberta announced funding for this program in October of last year, and if a safe-injection site were to come to Medicine Hat Hill says who would fund it is still up in the air.
Hill says a safe-injection site is all about giving people a place they feel safe to inject their drugs, but also to educate them.
“At the site, if created, there would be someone overseeing it. There would also be a place to dispose of (needles), and get clean needles,” she said. “This site would also give these people a place to access resources within the city. It would act as a place where they could learn about where they can go when they need help.”
Hill says both the drug users and the community would benefit from a site in Medicine Hat.
“For the individual, it creates a trusting relationship for someone who doesn’t always access traditional health care and support. Usually when there is a supervised site, there is a decrease in the use of emergency services,” she said. “A site would also decrease the likelihood of finding things like needles in playgrounds and it could actually decrease crime.”
Hill said she did not want to speculate on how badly the community needs a safe-injection site, but did share some statistics on drug usage in Medicine Hat.
“Our organization is the group that distributes injection equipment and over the past three years we have seen a 114 per cent increase in the number of the clients in our programs,” she said. “We have also seen a 56 per cent increase in needles distributed — year over year we are seeing an increase.”
In 2016, the HIV Community Link handed out 242,000 needles in Medicine Hat, in March of this year it handed out 25,000.
“We are seeing a huge increase in Medicine Hat, which is usually an indicator that something like this could be useful,” said Hill.
Hill says there will be multiple organizations meeting to determine the usefulness of a safe-injection site, with one of those being the Medicine Hat Police Service. Insp. Joe West has been with the service for 20 years and says over the past few there has been an increase in drug usage.
“We have certainly seen an increase in the intensity of drug use over the past couple years. That is primarily due to the use of methamphetamine,” he said. “Until a few years ago the drug of choice in Medicine Hat was crack and crack-cocaine. With the uprise of meth usage we are seeing people get very intense highs and do things they wouldn’t be otherwise doing — we are also seeing an increase in mental health calls, which is often linked to drug usage.”
Hill says she is hoping to have the information gathered by the end of summer. If a safe-injection site is to open in Medicine Hat Hill says it would, “likely not be during this calendar year.”
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