Thank you, Madam Chair.
Thank you for having me here today.
I want to start with a personal story about going to California in the nineties to work and living with a bunch of young people. Lots of people went to school. Everybody had jobs in the sports, entertainment and music industries, and everybody was using meth and speed in order to get through school and the pressures of working all the time.
I think what had happened was that it just became so common and so easy. Now all across the States people are using crystal meth, and it actually just recently came here. It's actually quite easy to access in the schools, as well, these days. My son's in school, and he says drugs are just so easy for young people to get access to that it's incredible. Also, it's not surprising that if young people are using drugs, they would use them later on in life.
I'm the executive director of the Overdose Prevention Society, located in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. Our facility includes an outdoor smoking area that seats 13 people, and it's one of only two in Canada. We also have an indoor area that seats 13 people, which is an injection area. We see up to about 700 people a day at our site.
We're located in one of the two alleys that are most used by drug users in Canada. It's one of the busiest sites. It's on par with InSite right now.
At our site, no one's ever died. Around half of our participants use crystal meth now. Many use it in conjunction with heroin and fentanyl, including speedballs, which are both at the same time.
The reason people use crystal meth is that obviously it takes away some of the pain and suffering, but it's cheap and lasts longer than most other drugs. In the Downtown Eastside, many of the drug users are most regularly using what's cheapest and easiest to attain, and crystal meth is definitely one of those.
People who use stimulant drugs like meth and cocaine are also at risk of overdose from fentanyl and other contaminants. Safe supply means pharmaceutical-grade stimulants that are easily accessible to people. Therefore, getting people safe access to drugs that include crystal meth would probably be one of the better things you could do just in terms of a stimulant that's not going to be contaminated with everything under the sun. A lot of the behaviours and illnesses people are experiencing are from the contamination.
They use laundry detergent and pig dewormer. There's fentanyl in the crystal meth. There's everything you could possibly imagine, and we have no idea how some of these affect behaviour or even people's livers. The long-term health effects of that are just incredible.
It's really in the Downtown Eastside, especially, that everything's made out of garbage. Anything you can imagine is in there, and it's really quite horrible. We know that, because we test the drugs. We do testing of drugs and we can test up to, I think, 100,000 different things, so we can see that they're highly contaminated.
We see people who have been awake for days quite frequently. This can lead to psychosis, paranoia, violence, hallucinations and hospitalization. Unfortunately, hospitals don't have the capacity to deal with this.
The other night we brought in a woman who's homeless and who uses our site frequently. She also volunteers with us. She uses a combination of drugs. It took one of our volunteers four hours waiting at the hospital for her to get in, and she was released immediately untreated and came back to us. I've been down there working for 12 years, so I'm capable of helping people in these situations, but it's really challenging.
It's really difficult that the hospital system can't accommodate it. It's just overwhelmed with other situations, including the overdose crisis in general.
Recommendations to improve health outcomes for drug users would be safe alternative prescriptions with known potency and ingredients, safe harm reduction supplies, safe smoking sites... People are turning to shooting drugs because there's no place to be seen safely using smoked drugs, so they're injecting them or just learning to inject them. It's really important that we give people a safe smoking area, which in B.C.... Actually in Edmonton they have a state-of-the-art facility, which I don't think is necessary. You can have some of these as really basic pop-up services in the crisis that can help people immediately and are not that high a cost.
The truth is that the high cost is to continue on with these crises the way that they are, criminalizing people and having people do crime and survival sex trade, women putting themselves at risk. That's going to be the high cost for Canada in the long term. Really what is needed is to do the right thing by giving people safe places to use, treated by professionals, safe access to drugs that won't harm them or cause damage to them. It will reduce crime, all these things that I think would be really important.
Rehabilitation includes a safe supply and detox that includes safe drug alternatives, getting people onto something that's not going to hurt them long term. There are a lot of people who we see who have mental and physical health conditions, permanent conditions that are really painful, like terminal cancer, who may need something for the rest of their life. They're self-medicating with things that are going to hurt them and actually make things worse for them. We really need to figure out how to help these folks. There are a lot of simple ways of doing it.
Thank you.