Montaner again laid out his case against the RCMP’s covert actions. At their first meeting, Souccar repeatedly said he couldn’t accept that version of events. But, according to Montaner, Bass, who also attended, repeatedly interjected on points of dispute, saying, “Dr. Montaner is right.”
Montaner says Souccar soon came around to sounding more sympathetic to the centre’s viewpoint. But on Feb. 12, Souccar dashed the physician’s hopes again with a letter. “After considerable reflection, I must respectfully decline any further involvement of the RCMP in any joint media release with your organization relating to supervised injection sites,” Souccar wrote to Montaner. He did, however, seem to acknowledge in the letter that the RCMP should never have sought out anti-Insite research in the first place. “I sincerely regret,” Souccar wrote, “that the RCMP’s best intentions to participate in finding solutions to such an important social issue, unwittingly took us down a path outside our mandate.”
Even though Souccar pulled the plug, once and for all, on the idea of a joint news event, he didn’t sever ties with Montaner. In fact, Souccar invited Montaner to address a meeting last winter in Vancouver of the leadership of major North American drug enforcement agencies. And Souccar went even further—asking Montaner to set up guided tours of the Insite facility for the same skeptical law enforcement leaders. “It was a great experience,” Montaner says.
His respect for Souccar and Bass leaves Montaner suspecting others are to blame for the ultimate failure of his centre and the RCMP to come to terms. “The [centre] draws a very strong distinction between the co-operative response provided by the RCMP leadership in B.C. and Raf Souccar, and the cancellation of the media conference by Ottawa,” the centre declared in its statement filed on June 24 with the complaints commission. But exactly who in Ottawa made the decision to cancel is far from clear. A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, the minister responsible for the federal police force, said his office doesn’t know anything about the matter.
Closing down Insite, though, remains a fixed priority for the Conservative government. Senior RCMP officers might have been ready back in 2008 to acknowledge the “extensive body” of studies on the benefits of supervised injection sites, but federal cabinet ministers have never accepted anything of the sort. A key figure in the saga is Clement. At the 2007 annual meeting of the Canadian Medical Association, he took the doctors to task over the CMA’s support for Insite. Clement claimed there was “academic debate going on” over the research into supervised injection, and alluded to new studies “questioning of the research that has already taken place.”
It’s likely he was referring to the critique of Insite produced for the RCMP, given that his remarks came a few months after Mangham’s review was posted on the Internet. Still, Clement appointed his own expert advisory committee to review the research, too. That committee’s April 2008 report found that Insite encourages drug users to seek counselling and treatment, and that its public image is positive.
On the facility’s local impact, the committee concluded that Insite cuts down on shooting up in the surrounding neighbourhood, without increasing petty crime. However, Clement zeroed in on certain of its findings about Insite’s limited impact, such as mathematical modelling that shows the facility probably only saves one addict a year from death by overdose, and an estimate that only five per cent of Downtown Eastside drug injections take place at Insite.
Clement wouldn’t renew Insite’s exemption from the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act beyond summer 2008, which would have forced the facility to close. But the group that manages Insite took the issue to court and won a reprieve. That complex legal battle continues. Early this year, the B.C. Court of Appeal upheld the initial decision of a lower court that allowed Insite to stay open. The court ruled, in part, that Insite provides a health service, which brings it under the province’s power over health, although there are overlapping federal jurisdictions, including criminal justice. The federal government appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada, which agreed in late June to hear the jurisdictional arguments. (The RCMP cited this ongoing case, along with the centre’s application to the complaints commission, as reasons for not answering questions from Maclean’s.)
There’s a striking contrast between the government’s waging of a public campaign against Insite, while top RCMP officers simultaneously engaged in private bridge-building sessions with Montaner. As the politicians sought the power to close Insite, senior Mounties quietly learned about the research into supervised injection. They seemed—based on Harriman’s email to Montaner on Oct. 28, 2008—to accept the centre’s findings supporting Insite. And they appeared—based on Souccar’s letter to him on Feb. 12, 2010—to regret the RCMP’s attempts to cast doubt on that research. The question now is whether these revelations about the undisclosed evolution in the RCMP’s perspective on the Insite experiment will have any impact on the government’s determination to end it.
