By Gillian Kolla and Laurie Edmiston
Imagine 11 Canadians fatally poisoned every day, with the death toll climbing every year. Imagine hospitals across the country dealing with a 27% surge in admissions to treat these poisonings, and a 73% increase in emergency room visits in Ontario alone.
As the year winds to a close and we reflect on the past year, we’re looking back at all the important news shared through the CATIE Blog in 2018.
by Kate Mason
Despite the fact that harm reduction services and ideas are always started by people who use drugs, they are not always included in the design and delivery of these programs as they become more formalized, especially in healthcare settings and for medical issues related to drug use.
Canada’s overdose crisis continues to grow, claiming nearly 4,000 lives last year alone. In the midst of this emergency, more than 1,000 frontline workers converged in Edmonton last month for Stimulus 2018, Canada’s first national conference on harm reduction and drug policy.
By Tara Marie Watson and Carol Strike
Supervised injection services (SIS) provide safer spaces for people to inject drugs and help reduce the risk of overdose and behaviours linked to HIV and hepatitis C. Now more than ever, as Canada continues to experience an overdose crisis that took nearly 4,000 lives in 2017, people who use drugs need barrier-free access to these services. Policing practices – such as arresting people near harm reduction programs – can be major barriers to SIS attendance and operation.
We recently completed a study focused on how to improve SIS-police relationships. For this research, we interviewed SIS managers, program coordinators and police liaisons in Europe, Australia, Quebec and British Columbia, reviewed international literature on harm reduction training for police, and conducted focus group consultations with Toronto-based SIS/harm reduction workers, people who inject drugs and police. Our multi-stakeholder team (including researchers, SIS managers, harm reduction workers and student trainees) used the information we gathered to identify factors that may help to improve relationships between SIS and local police. Here are our five recommendations: