It’s interesting that the Vancouver Island Health Authority is quietly moving forward with its harm-reduction strategy.
What’s perhaps more interesting is that the public was relatively quiet about a previously contentious issue.
Our story last week about VIHA’s plans to expand the initiative – which provides crack kits, needles and other drug-use paraphernalia to reduce disease transmission, and thus cut health-care costs – to more Island locations generated some response from readers, but overall, there’s been little heard about the program since last year.
Yet the service has operated at three central Island locations, including one in Nanaimo, as a secondary service (the site primarily provides other health-care services), and as a primary service at Harris House, just around the corner from city hall.
Perhaps the previously vocal opposition to this street-level mode of harm reduction was overshadowed by the intense anger regarding another, broader form – the city’s partnership with the province on a strategy to reduce homelessness.
That public outcry certainly wasn’t shy leading up to the civic election in November, and though it’s quieted somewhat, there’s no question residents’ anger itself remains simmering.
That discomfort could boil over again as residents learn where VIHA plans to locate additional secondary harm reduction sites. As the downtown is already served by the existing facilities, the rest of the city should expect to become home to at least one or perhaps more distribution sites.
As VIHA keeps the exact locations quiet, it will be interesting to see if anyone notices, or if the opposition proves to be another campaign based more on fear of the unknown and less on fact.
