I found this disturbing. What are your views? 
SAN FRANCISCO - City health officials took
steps Thursday toward opening the nation’s first legal safe-injection
room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs
under the supervision of nurses.
Hoping
to reduce San Francisco’s high rate of fatal drug overdoses, the public
health department co-sponsored a symposium on the only such facility in
North America, a 4-year-old Vancouver site where an estimated 700 users
a day self-administer narcotics under the supervision of nurses. “Having
the conversation today will help us figure out whether this is a way to
reduce the harms and improve the health of our community,” said Grant
Colfax, director of HIV prevention for the San FranciscoDepartment of Public Health.
Organizers of the daylong forum, which also
included a coalition of nonprofit health and social-service groups,
acknowledge that it could take years to get an injection facility up
and running. Along with legal hurdles, such an effort would be almost
sure to face political opposition.
Bertha Madras, deputy director of demand reduction for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, called San Francisco’s consideration of such a facility “disconcerting” and “poor public policy.”
“The
underlying philosophy is, ’We accept drug addiction, we accept the
state of affairs as acceptable,”’ Madras said. “This is a form of
giving up.”
Sixty-five
similar facilities exist in 27 cities in eight countries, but no other
U.S. cities have considered creating one, according to Hilary McQuie,
Western director for the Harm Reduction Coalition, a nonprofit that
promotes alternative drug treatment methods.
“If
it happens anywhere in the U.S., it will most likely start in San
Francisco,” McQuie said. “It really just depends on if there is a
political will here. How long it takes for that political will to
develop is the main factor.”
Drug
overdoses represented about one of every seven emergency calls handled
by city paramedics between July 2006 and July 2007, according to San
Francisco Fire Department Capt. Niels Tangherlini. At the same time,
the number of deaths linked to overdoses has declined from a high of
about 160 in 1995 to 40 in 2004, he said.
Colfax
estimated that there are between 11,000 and 15,000 intravenous drug
users in San Francisco, most of them homeless men. Like many large U.S.
cities, the city operates a clean-needle exchange program to reduce HIV
and Hepetitis C infections.
Advocates
plan to work on building community support for a safe-injection center,
including backing from Mayor Gavin Newsom and the Board of Supervisors.
While it’s too
early to tell what the room in San Francisco would look like,
Vancouver’s InSite program is located on the upper floor of a low-rise
building in a downtown neighborhood where drug users shoot up in the
open.The site, exempt from federal drug laws so
users can visit without fear of arrest, has 12 private booths where
addicts inject drugs such as heroin, cocaine or crystal. They can use
equipment and techniques provided by the staff, said Thomas Kerr, a
University of British Columbia researcher who has extensively studied
the program.
While
800 overdoses have occurred on the premises, Kerr said, none of them
resulted in death because of the medical supervision provided at
InSite. His research also has shown an increase in addicts seeking drug
treatment and a decrease in abandoned syringes, needle-sharing,
drug-related crime and other problems since the clinic opened, he said.
The results indicate the idea is worth replicating, despite the criticism it may attract, Kerr said.
“I
prefer the approach of the Vancouver Police Department, which was: ’We
don’t like the idea of this, but let’s look at the evidence and at the
end of three years we will tell you either this is something we can
support or it’s something we can’t support,”’ he said.
Subject: SF Considers "Shooting Gallery" for drug addicts 
