I'll try to answer that as well as the earlier question in terms of success and where we should be investing. First, these programs are not clinical trials, so we have to look at data on deaths and things like that.
To give people context, when Insite opened, it was in the midst of a public health emergency, as was mentioned, and we had the highest rate of HIV infection in the developed world. Because of the comprehensive approach, which included Insite, we have seen a greater than 90% reduction in new HIV infections. Insite is a public health program. It's not a housing program. It's not a treatment program. So having those types of expectations makes no sense.
Because people are dying, and British Columbia is on track to have over a thousand people die this year, young people in the prime of their lives, we need public health interventions and we need them now. We need the things that were mentioned like take-home naloxone, absolutely, and public health strategies to address overdose, including supervised consumption. I think the band-aid point is a good one in that when people are bleeding, you need band-aids. But you also need more comprehensive approaches to prevent bleeding in the first place.
We don't want to have a system that just pulls people out of the river without going upstream to figure out why they're in the river in the first place. These are just structural issues. We need a national approach to the treatment of opioid addiction, and the Canadian research initiative funded by the federal government through CIHR intends to do that.
The other is training health care providers. To use the example of Winnipeg and the emergency room, at Vancouver Coastal Health, which has been dealing with this for a long time, there still have not been the dedicated resources so that emergency room physicians can just pick up the phone and say, “I'm sending someone over to be initiated on Suboxone”, or “I've started it tonight, and they're going to have an appointment tomorrow morning.”
I'll go back to my point about mental health and substance use. We need strategies focused on substance use and on shifting money to mental health and substance use or it just will not trickle down to the needed substance use interventions. Focus on guidelines, focus on practitioners, and don't divide these types of interventions as in opposition.