Thanks for the question.
Low threshold really, to me.... Heather has explained it, but ultimately I visualize it in my mind as like a triangle. If you think of the bottom of the triangle as the base in which we collect people into the system and the peak of the triangle as where we exit them in terms of treatment, the bottom of the triangle has to be broad and it has to be on the street. We have thousands of people in our community who are addicted and homeless and suffer from social problems, and a traditional mechanism of health care delivery just doesn't reach them.
The bottom of the triangle is a way of engaging people such that they will receive and accept the service. If we raise the threshold and say, “These are the conditions by which you need to receive your health care”, we automatically have excluded hundreds and sometimes thousands of folks.
So the argument and clearly the evidence that shows that low-threshold programs engage people is really, I think, treatment. Without the injection site, we would not be engaging a whole ton of people into treatment. We know that's a fact, because we know now, since we've built the Insite/Onsite program above it, that just since the fall we've had over 250 people through the detox and treatment centre right above the injection site. Again, that's a low-threshold form of treatment, because we know that without that detox and treatment program being attached to the injection site, they would never come through the door. We've had over 50 folks, just since the end of September, go into long-term treatment as a result of walking in the door of the injection site.
And the 5% reference to the number of addicts who use the site regularly as being the ones we are attempting to target, who are the folks who are the most marginalized and the ones who are the least likely to use traditional medical services—