LOCAL STORY CREDIT: GILES CLASEN WE NEED TO BE HAVING CONVERSATIONS ABOUT SYRINGE ACCESS PROGRAMS BY GILES CLASEN LISA RAVILLE JOINED THE HARM REDUCTION CENTER in 2009 as its executive director. The center is the largest syringe exchange program in the state of Colorado and provides clean needles to drug users, as well as other support services, to more than 10,000 individuals. In 2020, the program had more than 4,000 participants. What makes the center unique is that it provides services to both participants who are housed as well as those experiencing homelessness. The organization seeks to build trust with the people it serves and does not judge individuals seeking new needles. This approach, at the very least, helps reduce the public health risks related to drug use. (Raville is eager to tell you no one has gone to rehab after they died.) The center’s success lies in the fact that the staff treats all participants with the highest level of respect and provide other services. The organization also can be a place to receive mail, find help getting on Medicaid, or even receive wound care. Ultimately, the Harm Reduction Center helps keep individuals alive by teaching the safest way to use drugs. It also teaches individuals to never inject alone and provides training on how to administer Narcan, a medication that can quickly reverse an opioid overdose. Additionally, the Harm Reduction Center collects and safely disposes of thousands of used syringes a year, which helps protect the public and the environment from exposure to the waste. Since Raville joined the Harm Reduction Center, the organization has worked to help pass multiple pieces of statewide legislation to expand services to drug users and helped make multiple policy changes in Denver. The following are comments Raville made during a recent interview and have been edited for clarity. HOW HAS 2020 IMPACTED DRUG USE IN DENVER? I just got the new numbers from the coroner’s office on drugrelated deaths in Denver this year, and they’re super high, so everyone’s upset, as you can imagine. There have been 284 drug-related deaths in Denver, as of December 4, 2020. In 2019 the number of deaths was 225, so this is the deadliest year ever in Denver for overdoses, and we’ve got to do better. Doing better will take a multi-pronged approach. We need to be having conversations with folks that fentanyl is here. Getting fentanyl testing strips and having access to Narcan is essential. We also know that using alone is a problem, so we need overdose prevention sites, where we can remove use out of the public sphere and put it into a controlled environment. We need to be having conversations about stimulant overdoses. A lot of people who use stimulants don’t know that they can overdose on them. Stimulant overdoses present a little different, more like a heart attack, stroke, or seizure. I think we need a lot of education and a supervised use site. Lastly, we have a very unpredictable drug supply so we need to start talking about what a safer supply would look like, as they do in other countries. WHAT WILL IT TAKE TO CREATE OVERDOSE PREVENTION SITES? It’s difficult to go from zero to an overdose prevention site. We have to talk about what we can currently do with a syringe access program and engage with folks in the deadliest overdose crisis we’ve ever had in parallel with an unprecedented global pandemic. The number one substance use treatment admission requirement in Denver, Colorado and the United States is that people have to be alive. Dead drug users do not have the opportunity for recovery, and when people are alive, there’s hope. The problem is there’s no good media representation of a syringe access program. A lot of times people think it’s dark and dingy; they’re not sure what’s going on in there. We had a lot of those issues initially with syringe access programs. In particular, we heard, “Oh, it’s going to decrease property values in the neighborhood; they’ll be terrible neighbors.” Well, of course, we’ve been great neighbors, dare I say, award-winning neighbors. What’s nice about how we’re 6 DENVER VOICE January 2021
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