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Nanaimo’s needle disposal program will be copied in other communities

City has seven 24-hour needle disposal boxes
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John Horn, City of Nanaimo social planner, left, and Griffin Russell, regional harm reduction coordinator for Island Health, view the public needle disposal program as something that can be useful in other Island communities. (TAMARA CUNNINGHAM/The News Bulletin)

If people aren’t given a garbage can, it’s a little much to ask them to responsibly deal with garbage, says city social planner John Horn, who questioned, seven years ago, if the same option should exist for drug users and their needles.

“They were sticking them in garbage cans, putting them in trees, hiding them under rocks —it probably seemed like a good idea at the time but it’s not an adequate way to dispose of things,” said Horn.

The city was getting complaints. There were discarded syringes in public areas like parks, and people in neighbourhoods often expressed concern about children, or themselves, pricking fingers on a needle.

Horn said the city realized no one would ride to its rescue. It looked to a needle box program in Edmonton and launched its own in 2011, giving people a safe place to drop off their needles. There are now seven locations available 24 hours a day and another 10 in public facilities.

It’s a program that’s made Nanaimo an example to Island Health two years ago when it was looking at what it could and should be doing, and in the last year, communities have called Nanaimo about its work as a result of the opioid crisis.

“It’s really paying it forward I suppose because that’s what we did with Edmonton,” said Horn of the inquires to Nanaimo.

The health authority has contributed two boxes back to Nanaimo, which will be installed this year, as it distributes others across the Island. Fifteen have been brought to places like North Cowichan, Duncan and Sayward so far this year and 20 more are on order. The boxes are free and Island Health provides needle disposal for municipalities at no charge.

Griffin Russell, regional harm reduction coordinator for Island Health, said the health authority is engaging with all public works departments across the Island, offering them a number of boxes based on the size of the community. There’s hope for a consistent plan across Vancouver Island.

“We want people to be able to see them and to recognize them, we don’t want some communities to feel like they have some type of problem that doesn’t extend into other communities,” Russell said. “I wouldn’t even say its a problem. I’d just say this is a reality.”

He said there are only a few communities that have declined the boxes, either not seeing the need or because they are reviewing their current system, but otherwise there’s strong interest including from Campbell River, Port Alberni and Ladysmith.

Russell said it’s documented that people genuinely do care about not being witnessed using a needle in a public space and want to feel they are doing the responsible thing by getting rid of it safely, but there hasn’t necessarily been a culture of making disposal consistently available.

Two years ago, Island Health drew on Nanaimo’s program because part of harm reduction was giving access to sterile injecting and smoking supplies and Russell said it was only responsible to also have a system to have that equipment safely returned. Needles being improperly disposed of in communities has also been a long-standing issue and in 2015 there were concerns from Parksville and the Cowichan Valley, he said.

“We just kind of got to this point that we needed to have a system in place for the people who were accessing harm reduction supplies, but also for the community at large to see that this is something that we’re not ignoring, that we take very seriously and that, again, it goes hand-in-hand when you are distributing harm reduction supplies … it’s only reasonable to have a system in place to have them returned,” Russell said. “That just hasn’t always been there.”

In Nanaimo, while the program is expanding, it hasn’t eradicated discarded needles.

Needles are found by city staff members every day or are reported by the public throughout the city, according to Al Britton, the city’s manager of parks operations.

“They [needle boxes] help to a certain extent. They are a good thing to do because at least they give those who are conscious enough somewhere to take them and do that,” he said.

“You’re always going to get the group that don’t care and just are going to throw them on the ground and do whatever they want, but even if we cut it down 20-30 per cent, its 20-30 per cent less that’s on the floor.”

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