Health committee  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

Health committee  We have a place called the Crosstown Clinic in Vancouver. Probably no one has heard about it, except maybe Don and a few others. It gives safe access to heroin to about 100 people. It's injectable, and there are doctors available there to help them. It's a very small program, and

Health committee  In my opinion, the more people we get safe access to drugs, the more we're taking people like him out of the picture completely. We need people to get safe access to dosed drugs and to be seen and cared for by medical professionals. I think that's really the biggest solution in t

Health committee  Yes, or a stimulant replacement. People need to get care. Some choose to use drugs, but a lot of folks are using drugs because they're self-medicating for a variety of reasons and they need medical care. A lot of these people are the most vulnerable in society. We need to work o

Health committee  I see people in and out of jail all the time. Even the police I speak to, the ambulance people, the firefighters, all know that we need to get folks safe access to something that's not going to kill them. That's the first line of front-line treatment, especially with people who h

Health committee  I believe that it's going to cost our country a lot more if we continue the way we are going right now, and that we need to do something we haven't done before. This is a national health crisis. We need to call it that and move forward in a big way, or else we're in big trouble.

Health committee  It's operating under the basis that it's a provincial crisis. We don't have a federal exemption, but it is operating because of the provincial crisis.

Health committee  No, we don't. I've been working in shelters in the Downtown Eastside for years, in housing. Dealing with folks who come in who are in crisis, our staff is some of the best. We have people from InSite, but it can be very difficult and we certainly don't have the support we need.

Health committee  I do know that you can pass it on with pipes, that clean pipes would be helpful. I don't know the statistics, but I know that clean pipes, clean equipment, clean needles, obviously, do the same thing.

Health committee  I just want to say that we are trained, and I've been trained, over time, in bringing down violence. It can be done but you need the proper training for that. It's very difficult on nurses in that environment, I think.

Health committee  The one that we set up is in one of the two most used alleys for drug use, and it had been before we set up. My response to that would be where people are using drugs, you would set one up there already, so that it doesn't have an impact on neighbourhoods. Also, we make sure that

Health committee  Yes, we have a drug testing machine that comes in a few days a week, and then we can test all drugs that come in. I think it's like 100,000 drugs and other analogues including.... You would be shocked at what people inject into their bodies and that they don't know what strength

Health committee  I don't know if any of the you know him, but Dr. Mark Tyndall from the B.C. Centre for Disease Control has a pilot project that he would like to bring that would make it easy for people to get safe access to heroin. I think that it should include stimulants as well, because peopl

Health committee  The main thing is disease prevention. It's cheaper to give people a needle than to have people go through all the treatments of hepatitis or HIV long term.

Health committee  Yes. In the Downtown Eastside there are a lot of people who use whatever is available and cheapest. I've done so many overdoses—you can't imagine—and I don't see people get up and be violent that way. People get upset. Sometimes they cry. They don't know what's happened to them.