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 intravenous 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 Francisco Department of Public Health.
Organizers of the day-long 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 at the state and federal level, 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. city has considered creating one, according to Hilary McQuie, western director for the Harm Reduction Coalition, a nonprofit that promotes alternative drug treatment methods.
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.
In Switzerland, Spain and other European countries with such programs, the sites have been placed in existing public health clinics and created as stand-alone facilities, said Andrew Reynolds, a program coordinator with San Francisco’s sexually transmitted diseases clinic.
Possible options for one in the city include homeless shelters, AIDS clinics or drug treatment centers, he said.
“They aren’t these hedonistic dens of iniquity,” Reynolds said. “There is no buying or selling of drugs on the premises.”
