Really, what happened in Vancouver is that we had a public health emergency declared because of the epidemics of HIV infection and overdose occurring in that community.
To give you a quick perspective, during the height of this emergency we were experiencing anywhere up to 400 infections. That has now declined to fewer than 40. At that time, the lifetime medical costs associated with those new infections would be in the order of $180 million. Now they are down to something more like $16 million.
Likewise we have seen massive declines in overdose stats and ambulance call-outs for those events. As a result of some innovative approaches, which have also been rigorously evaluated and verified in the scientific literature—such as Vancouver's Insite supervised injection site—overdose deaths have declined substantially. In fact they have declined by over 35% just in the area around that facility.
Clearly what we're saying is we need to take an evidence-based approach to this. If we do, and we're careful, and we evaluate, and scale up those pilots that do work, we can not only prevent a great deal of suffering, but we can also save a lot of money and reduce the burden on our hospitals where currently people who use drugs occupy a great number of acute beds and spend a lot of time in our emergency rooms.