Thank you so much.
My name is Sarah Blyth. I'm representing the Overdose Prevention Society. We opened an emergency safe injection site in order to deal with the emergence of overdoses in the Downtown Eastside and all of the deaths that were happening in 2014.
We see up to 700 people daily in the Downtown Eastside. The OPS in the Downtown Eastside have collectively saved 6,000 lives in the past four years. Unfortunately, the drug supply continues to get more contaminated, and that contamination has spread across Canada. Overdose prevention saves lives in emergency situations, but in order to save lives we need to take immediate action or more people will die.
COVID has only complicated the situation. We are telling people to stay home, but more drug users are dying of overdoses than of COVID. In order to keep people home, we need to give them a safe supply, something that they're not buying from drug dealers on the street. It's something that doctors can prescribe so that they are not dying in their housing alone, so that they can stay home and so that they don't come out of hospitals. We've had a lot of people go into hospitals, then hotels, and then come right back out to the street with COVID to look for drugs because they're not getting what they need. It's just further causing harm and a difficult situation.
The overdose prevention site has become sort of a one-stop-shop for everything because of COVID. A lot of services have closed down. For any person who is homeless and using drugs, they come to us for housing support. We help people get housing. Once a week we usually get someone housing, though I have to say that there isn't really any housing right now. It's a very difficult situation. It's also really hard to go home at the end of the night and have people stay out in the cold, so we do what we can. Working on the front lines, as you can imagine, is very challenging right now.
We provide medical support. We deal with helping to clean wounds, provide wound care and all kinds of things. We also deal with mental health support. A lot of times people go in to get their mental health support from the hospital, but then they have to leave an hour later. It's the same with medical support. Usually they come to us, and we do our best to help people, but we're one of the only places. We distribute information. A lot of people don't have cellphones or television access.
We now distribute clothing, food, blankets and mats to sleep outside at night. We do pretty much everything as an overdose prevention site. I just wanted you all to know this because I think it's pretty important to know what these front-line services are doing and how much we're taking on due to other services shutting down.
I'm just going to tell you what we need from the federal government. We really need some sort of a national housing plan that would take immediate action. We need housing, and right now I can't get people into housing no matter how hard I try. Because I'm on the front line with people, I spend a lot of my time side by side with people who are crying, who are sleeping outside and who are getting sick needlessly.
We also need support. The City of Vancouver and council have passed a motion regarding decriminalization, and they need support. They understand the challenges. I really believe that the city council that we have, with Mayor Kennedy Stewart, understands the challenges that we're facing. We really need to—