Supervised Injection Site - Evaluations

Evaluations

In the late 1990s there were a number of studies available on consumption rooms in Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands. “The reviews concluded that the rooms contributed to improved public and client health and reductions in public nuisance but stressed the limitations of the evidence and called for further and more comprehensive evaluation studies into the impact of such services.” To that end, the two non-European injecting facilities, Australia’s Sydney Medically Supervised Injecting Centre (MSIC) and Canada’s Vancouver Insite Supervised Injection Site have had more rigorous research designs as a part of their mandate to operate.

The NSW Government has provided extensive funding for ongoing evaluations of the Sydney MSIC, with a formal comprehensive evaluation produced in 2003, 18 months after the centre was opened. Other later evaluations studied various aspects of the operation - service provision (2005), community attitudes (2006), referral and client health (2007) and a fourth (2007) service operation and overdose related events. Other evaluations of drug related crime in the area were completed in 2006, 2008 and 2010, the SAHA International cost-effectiveness evaluation in 2008 and a final independent KPMG evaluation in 2010.

In 2003, 2006 and 2010 a drug prevention advocacy group, Drug Free Australia, completed analyses of evaluations up to these dates. The reports of these analyses, distributed to the media and to politicians were informed by teams of published experts, researchers and professionals which in the 2010 analysis included Dr Robert DuPont, first President of the United States National Institute of Drug Abuse (NIDA). These analyses have led to a robust debate about the effectiveness of the Sydney MSIC in Australia. In the NSW parliament, some politicians from the Labor Party which installed the injecting room referred to Drug Free Australia as "peddling misinformation", claiming that MSIC staff members of the facility had refuted their analysis, referring other members back to the official evaluations. In turn, Drug Free Australia has documented its allegation that the Sydney injecting room's evaluations were demonstrably the production of partisan sympathizers and colleagues of injecting room staff, responsible for "often providing misleading or totally erroneous conclusions or otherwise failing to make the necessary conclusions from negative data." Drug Free Australia has likened the extant criticisms of climate science, where science is alleged to have been manipulated to fit ideological and political ends, to that of its criticisms of the injecting room's scientific evaluations.

The Vancouver Insite facility was evaluated during the first three years of its operation by researchers from the BC Center for Excellence in HIV/AIDS with published and some unpublished reports available. In March 2008 a Final Report of the Expert Advisory Committee appointed by the Canadian Ministry of Health was released, evaluating the performance of the Vancouver Insite against its stated objectives.