Toronto doesn't look likely to get a supervised injection facility anytime soon, even though numerous studies have shown such facilities to save lives as well as healthcare dollars.

Nearly a decade's worth of research on Vancouver's supervised injection facility InSite has shown it to lower the spread of HIV and decrease the incidence of overdose fatalities in the city's Downtown Eastside. Furthermore, drug injection in public spaces has become less common in the area and locals are now less likely to tread on discarded syringes while walking the streets.

There have been over 4,000 overdose deaths in B.C. from illicit drug use since 1990. The staggering death toll does not even begin to measure the trauma that has been imposed on individual lives, family members and loved ones of those who have died. All of them, preventable deaths.

Public policy inaction and criminalization are some of the root causes of these deaths, unfortunately. Health and human rights approaches to drug addiction are not coming on stream fast enough.