A Call for More Calgary Supervised Consumption Sites
Author(s): Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Publication (Outlet/Website): Canadian Students for Sensible Drug Policy
Publication Date (yyyy/mm/dd): 2018/03/23
One doctor made a public call for supervised consumption sites. The call is for more of them in suburbanite Calgary.
One of the centers opened in the downtown core of Calgary, Alberta. It is at the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre. The goal is to react to the opioid crisis in order to reduce the number of overall overdoses associated with fentanyl.
Dr. Hakique Virani, an addictions specialist, explained, “There’s not a silver bullet to solving this epidemic… It’s a combination of a number of very strongly evidenced-based public health interventions.”
The Alberta Health Services published a Safeworks Supervised Consumptions Services report for the month and found more people use illicit drugs now with the professional medical supervision of the Sheldon M. Chumir Health Centre.
470 people, some repeat attendees and others not, have come to the site to mostly use meth/crystal or fentanyl. If divided by sex, the majority of the people in attendance are men with a mean age of 36, which would amount to a young middle aged population of men.
However, those are the ones who placed an address. Others live in a homeless shelter or do not have a fixed address. Based on available data, the call for more supervised consumption sites is justified because these will improve the health outcomes of individual Calgarians. Fentanyl and opioid crisis afflicting Alberta, Virani told the Calgary Eyeopener.
Virani said, “We miss certain populations with this type of service… One of the characteristics of this epidemic is that it’s affecting a lot of people in the suburbs who use substances alone… Harm reduction outside of inner cities, there’s no reason why we can’t do that… If geography is one of the barriers to people accessing that type of site, then offering it in multiple places would be wise.”
Happily, the overall visits to the Sheldon Chumir supervised consumption site are increasing, which will, in the short and long term, improve the health outcomes, as a statistical average, of the Calgarians, mostly ~36-year-old men, having addiction problems.
References
Alberta Health Services. (2018, March 14). Safeworks Monthly Report – February 2018: Supervised Consumption Services. Retrieved from https://www.albertahealthservices.ca/assets/healthinfo/mh/hi-amh-sup-con-chumir-2018-02.pdf.
Bell, R. (2017, May 24). Little pills, big trouble How Alberta’s fentanyl crisis escalated despite years of warnings. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news2/interactives/fentanyl-crisis-alberta/.
CBC News. (2017, November 7). Calgary’s new supervised consumption site already catching drug overdoses, co-ordinator says. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/safe supervised-consumption-sheldon-chumir-centre-calgary-alberta-1.4391235.
Ward, R. (2018, March 23). ‘No silver bullet’ but suburban supervised consumption sites would help, addiction specialist says. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/calgary supervised-consumption-sites-suburbia-1.4590400.
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