Mr. Speaker, I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak to Bill C-2, an act to amend the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. I am not pleased with the act, but I am pleased to have an opportunity to speak against it, because the act does serious damage to the notion of what government ought to be doing to help some of the most vulnerable people in our country, those who are seriously at risk of dying because of an addiction to a particular drug.
Maybe Conservatives do not have any sympathy for addicts, except for Mr. Ford, in Ontario. I do not know, but they certainly seem to be willing to put at very serious risk of death and further harm people who, by their circumstances, end up being addicted to drugs and could make use of a place such as InSite in Vancouver. They tried to shut it down, and they were told by the Supreme Court of Canada that they could not do it, so they are trying an end run around safe injection sites with this legislation.
Let us look at some raw numbers and the reason this safe injection site was established in the first place. There was a situation in the lower east side of Vancouver in the mid-1990s, when about 200 people a year were dying from drug overdoses. That is a serious public health issue. It is a serious crisis in public safety. There were all sorts of other harms associated with all that activity.
InSite was established to provide a safe place where those who were addicted could inject. It was supervised by professionals who were not only providing a safe place but were also providing other services, such as referrals and access to medical services, counselling, and programs that would lead to detoxification and overcoming their addictions.
In fact, users of this site were nearly two times as likely to go to a detox centre and go on drug programs than those who may have gone there occasionally. It was not the idea to allow the addiction to continue. It was an opportunity to get them out of addiction. As a result, twice the rate of participation in detoxification programs to get off drugs took place.
When InSite started to operate, the number of fatalities from drug overdoses in the lower east side in Vancouver went down by 35%. We are talking about 70 individuals a year whose lives were saved as a result of this. Those are a lot of human lives that one particular program was able to save by being in existence. What was the government's response? It was to get rid of harm reduction as a principle of drug treatment and to shut down InSite. It is trying an end run around the Supreme Court with this particular action.
Another statistic reported in a leading medical journal deals with the fact that there were 273 overdoses in a one-year period at InSite, but not one fatality, not one. That is indicative of the fact that the supervision of the safe injection site leads to greater safety and a lack of deaths. That is how it happens. When we add up some of these facts and the startling number of 70 lives a year saved, what is the possible excuse or reason the government has for introducing this legislation?
One thing we hear about often, even from the current government and lots of others, is something called evidence-based decision-making. We have heard that before: evidence-based decision-making. A good, sensible, reasonable government should be making decisions based on evidence.
What do we have here? We have more than 30 peer-reviewed studies published in some of the leading medical journals in the world. Members will have heard of them. They include the New England Journal of Medicine, one of the pre-eminent medical journals in the world; The Lancet, another significant British medical journal, which publishes only serious peer-reviewed, high-standard, high-quality studies; and the British Medical Journal.
More than 30 peer-reviewed studies have described the beneficial impacts of InSite, just this one particular operation. Some people and many studies have looked for the negative impact, but none have come up with any evidence demonstrating harm to the community.
We have a situation where the evidence is on the side of the use of places like InSite to facilitate harm reduction, the saving of lives, detoxification, helping addicts to get off drugs and making communities safer.
Those are the facts. That is the evidence that is brought to this. There is support from organizations like the Canadian Medical Association. It is hardly interested in promoting the use of drugs. It is hardly interested in having activities that are bad for patients and individuals. It sees it as a positive thing, and it has criticized the government for bringing forward Bill C-2.
Who else? The Canadian Nurses Association said:
Evidence demonstrates that supervised injection sites and other harm reduction programs bring critical health and social services to vulnerable populations—especially those experiencing poverty, mental illness and homelessness.
Here is the kicker. They said:
A government truly committed to public health and safety would work to enhance access to prevention and treatment services—instead of building more barriers.
That is what we have here, a building of more barriers to helping people who are addicted to drugs.
My community of St. John's East has its share of serious drug problems. They have escalated to the point now where we have hold-ups of convenience stores and gas stations taking place. There are houses being broken in to get money to buy drugs. Some of these drugs are actually prescription drugs. There's OxyContin, a major, significant, addictive prescription drug.
How did that become the bane of so many people's existence? It is something that was supposed to be reserved for only the most serious of pain in the rarest of circumstances. I do not want to exaggerate, but I have heard people say that it is being prescribed for anything from wisdom teeth being extracted to very low levels of pain, as commonly as any other painkiller, instead of being reserved for that particular rare occasion when someone was in such serious pain that addiction was not an issue, perhaps because they were in palliative care or were about to die.
In the time I have left, I do want to say that we have serious problems. There can be solutions. The government should be working very hard to find solutions. Instead, what we see is government acting against the medical profession's advice, that of the Canadian Nurses Association, the Canadian Medical Association and all sorts of significant scientific studies that have demonstrated the value of sites such as InSite in Vancouver. We see it taking action to make it nearly impossible for anyone to open further injection sites and perhaps making another attack to try to shut down InSite once again when it gets the opportunity to do so.
As I said at the beginning, I am glad I have had the chance to speak on this bill because I do oppose it. We are against this approach. We think this is a seriously harmful bill that will cause death to individuals who are vulnerable in our society because of their addictions, not allowing them to even get near the help they need. They will stay away. Obviously they will not be able to be near that.
If people are worried about heroin addicts in their backyards, they are going to find addicts a lot closer to their backyards if they do not have a site like InSite that can actually help deliver harm reduction and vital medical and other health services to these individuals.
