SUBSCRIBE: Missing news on social media? Subscribe to CHAT News Today's DAILY newsletter and stay up to date with your city.

Community group still exploring safe injection site

Sep 1, 2017 | 4:20 PM

 

MEDICINE HAT, AB — The drug crisis across Canada isn’t showing any signs of slowing down.

The number of overdoses and deaths continues to rise every month.

More and more cities are talking about the idea of safe injection sites and what they could mean for the community.

Medicine Hat is following suit.

The Medicine Hat Coalition on Supervised Consumption has been hard at work, trying to determine what services are missing from the community.

The group is made up of city representatives, police, different community groups and staff with Alberta Health Services.

They wanted to hear from the people who use drugs first hand and heard back from 185 people by conducting a survey over the summer.

One service the community may benefit from is having a safe injection site.

Leslie Hill is the executive director with HIV Community Link, a group which handed out more than 240,000 clean needles last year in Medicine Hat alone.

She said a safe site is one options, but another could be making naloxone kits even more available.

“We know that people use drugs and we know that across the country, and across the province, people are overdosing and people are dying as a result of overdose,” Hill said. “So it’s an opportunity for those people to access a place to safely use, knowing that they’re going to be using anyway.”

Hill said the next step will be to go through the research and determine what it is people here need to stay safe.

She said that will take some time.

Once that’s complete, the group wants to hear directly from the community and find out what residents in Medicine Hat think about a safe injection site.

Hill knows there is some tension about what a safe site means for a neighbourhood, but she said it comes down to education and understanding what a safe site could mean for the people using the space.

“It’s also an opportunity for us to engage in trusting relationships with our clients, so it creates a relationship where they know that we’re not judging them for the circumstances that they’re in and then we can talk to them about their other needs,” she said. “We help people to access housing programs and food and basic needs, support and addiction and mental health counselling. And we talk to them about opioid replacement therapy or accessing detox and treatment.”