The NZ Drug Foundation is proposing a three year pilot programme it says will take drug use off the streets and into safe, medically-supervised settings.
Sarah Helm said overdose prevention centres do not encourage drug use. Photo: Supplied/NZ Drug Foundation
The plan to trial an overdose prevention centre in the Auckland CBD was today unveiled by the foundation's executive director Sarah Helm at the Auckland City Mission.
Helm said currently people were turning a blind eye to overdoses and drug harm amongst Auckland's most vulnerable, particularly the homeless.
"That is causing untold harm for them, it is distressing for bystanders and inner-city businesses, and it takes up a lot of police and ambulance resources," she said in a statement.
"An overdose prevention centre would offer a more compassionate, health-based approach that is also better for the wider community."
Helm said the foundation wanted government support for the proposal. The government would need to use an Order in Council under the 1975 Misuse of Drugs Act to issue a licence for an overdose prevention centre.
Helm told Checkpoint that the centre would take drug use off the streets into safe, medically-supervised settings.
The foundation had canvassed those who would potentially use such a centre, she said.
"We had one woman we consulted with actually who said to us, 'the things that happen to me down the alleyway when I'm taking the drug wouldn't happen anymore. Would you really do this for us?'
"So that's what we're talking about a safe space for people to be in."
The evidence spoke for itself, Helm said.
"It does not encourage drug use, and in fact the opposite, people tend to then access social services, health interventions and treatment and in some countries they've seen a rapid decline in onset of some of those more harmful drugs being taken."
Synthetic cannabinoids, which caused at least 51 deaths between 2016 and 2020, were among the drugs favoured by this community, Helm said.
Māori were disproportionately represented in overdose statistics, with national rates of drug-related deaths three times higher than non-Māori, she said.
There were already 130 overdose prevention sites operating in at least 14 countries, the foundation said.
Dr Dan Werb, who directs the Centre on Drug Policy Evaluation in Toronto, told a room of politicians, health and business leaders at the launch of the centres' overwhelming success overseas.
"At this point there have been millions of individual injections that have taken place in the dozens, if not hundreds of these sites that are implemented worldwide and there have been zero deaths," he told Checkpoint.
Helm said that data from overseas overdose prevention centres showed that they save lives.