Vancouver’s mayor and council may soon cast aside a longstanding ban on indoor smoking to allow a two-year pilot of safe “indoor inhalation” spaces at select supervised consumption sites.
A staff report this month recommended the change as a harm reduction measure in a city and province grappling with an unrelenting and deadly overdose crisis.
“Outdoor supervised inhalation sites are the preferred option from a broad public health perspective and should be the first choice for supervised inhalation services,” the report states.
“However, the number of appropriate, available outdoor locations is limited. Staff believe that non-enforcement of the Health By-law at a small number of supervised consumption sites can make an important contribution to life saving efforts and serve as a pilot.”
Indoor drug inhalation is already permitted at federally-approved supervised consumption sites.
According to the report, The BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS on Powell Street — one of four Health Canada-approved service providers in the city — has already applied for permission to build six indoor inhalation booths. The centre has offered supervised consumption since 2020.
“This is a proposal for a two-year pilot on a recommendation by the health authorities and we have always said that we will follow health-informed policy,” said Coun. Sarah Kirby-Yung in an interview.
“This, I think, is a thoughtful approach to addressing a gap in the harm reduction continuum.”
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In a 2022 report, the BC Coroners Service found that 44 per cent of those who died from an overdose between August 2017 and July 2021 had inhaled their drugs. That’s an increase from the 36 per cent recorded between January 2016 and July 2017.
“People overdose just the same when they’re smoking so it’s really important to provide these places, and it’s even better when you can have doctors, nurses and health-care professionals follow up,” said Sarah Blyth, executive director of the Overdose Prevention Society, in an interview.
“You don’t want to have the only place people can go is injection sites, because the majority of people are smoking and they need help too.”
The Overdose Prevention Society currently operates a supervised consumption site in the Downtown Eastside with outdoor inhalation spaces, compliant with the bylaw.
British Columbia declared a public health emergency from the overdose crisis in 2016.
According to the BC Coroners Service, nearly seven people die from illicit drugs in the province each day, with more than 11,000 fatalities now on record since the emergency was declared. About 3,000 of those deaths were in Vancouver.
Blyth said the staff proposal is “a great step forward,” but doesn’t go far enough to address the crisis.
“We’re very slow to get some of these things started. I would love for it not to have to be a pilot project, I would love for it to be a project that had 20 booths or 30 booths or more, it’s severely needed,” she said.
“When you have these kind of care facilities that are meeting people where they’re at, you can get them access to a lot of different help.”
If the “non-enforcement” of the bylaw is temporarily approved in Vancouver, staff will report back to council with findings and recommendations for permanent regulation by the end of next month.
Kirby-Yung said one of the benefits of allowing indoor inhalation is that it keeps the activity inside the medical facility, closer to help, if needed. She agreed, however, that more needs to be done beyond the pilot program.
“While this is an important step, we can’t take our eye of the ball on the real gap here, which is in treatment,” she said. “We know that the treatment is not there on demand when people are ready for it and they need it.”
The report goes before mayor and council on Wednesday.
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