Ten years ago, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, a low-income area with a traumatized population and a crisis of homelessness, had the highest rate of HIV seroconversions in the western world, a rising incidence of deaths from drug overdoses and a Hepatitis C prevalence among the drug-using population that was at saturation levels.
The community came together with an innovative response to this: a supervised injection site called Insite. But Insite is more than that. It’s also a place that builds connections with marginalized people and where the level of trust among them is leveraged into other programs and services that they need.
At last month’s CATIE Forum on New Sciences, New Directions in HIV and Hepatitis C, I interviewed Darwin Fisher, the manager of Insite, about his program. You can watch my interview with the ever-engaging Darwin in the video below.