SFU researchers discover heroin trials produce no crime
Benedikt Fischer, 778.782.5274, bfa11@sfu.ca
Neil Boyd, 778.782.3324, 604.947.9569, nboyd@sfu.ca
Carol Thorbes, PAMR, 778.782.3035, cthorbes@sfu.ca
Residents and businesses should rest easy about having a government-sanctioned, secure heroin-injection clinic in their backyard concludes a new study co-authored by Simon Fraser University health scientist Benedikt Fischer and SFU criminologist Neil Boyd.
The two are among four researchers who have found that experimental medical heroin-prescription programs in Vancouver and Montreal, conducted 2004-2007, had no impact on their surrounding communities’ drug-related crime or disorder rates.
Serge Brochu and Benoit Lasnier at the University of Montreal were the other researchers involved in the first study of its kind in Canada.
The International Journal of Drug Policy has published their study online, A heroin prescription trial: Case studies from Montreal and Vancouver on crime and disorder in the surrounding neighbourhoods, at http://i.sfu.ca/bnvyPt.
Fischer and Boyd say their findings should increase health policymakers’ and government legislators’ confidence that using heroin-prescription clinics to offer treatment for long-term, chronic heroin addicts won’t necessarily harm communities.
“Conventional drug treatment programs can’t help 10 to 20 per cent of long-term, chronically ill heroin addicts kick their habit but controlled heroin-injection sites have proven to help,” notes Fischer. About a thousand of the Vancouver Downtown Eastside’s 8,000 to 10,000 or so heroin-addicted people could benefit from such an ongoing site,” notes Fischer. “But at the end of the day, most people care more about whether drug treatment intervention programs in their midst are going to harm their community rather than help addicts.”
The CIHR/PHAC (Canadian Institute of Health Research/Public Health Agency of Canada) Chair in Applied Public Health and Boyd undertook this study in 2005.
They looked at the community impact of the North American Opiate Medication Initiative (NAOMI)—the first such project in Canada—in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and in Montreal’s Plateau Mont-Royal district.
Using analysis of police data, Boyd investigated whether controlled, free heroin-injection prescription trials produced a honey-pot effect, drawing drug users and dealers like bears to honey.
“Block-by-block analysis of the neighbourhoods surrounding the NAOMI sites over a lengthy period of time enabled us to come up with concrete evidence that the project had no honey-pot effect,” says Boyd. “What makes this conclusion all the more convincing is the fact that it was consistent in two Canadian neighbourhoods with strikingly different income, urban, commercial and ethnic profiles.”
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