Our John Geddes looks inside the battle over British Columbia’s safe injection site and finds a remarkable series of events.
Our John Geddes looks inside the battle over British Columbia’s safe injection site and finds a remarkable series of events.
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.