Addiction Now: Safe Injection Facilities as a Public Health Strategy

Please join Open Society Institute–Baltimore, in collaboration with the New Day Campaign, for a discussion about how safe injection facilities reduce overdoses and increase access to treatment by allowing people who use drugs to inject opioids in a medical setting. How does this fit into a broader harm reduction strategy? What kind of public education and stigma reduction could make this solution more possible, less controversial?

Participants include Sarah Evans, a former coordinator of Vancouver’s Insite, North America’s first and only legal supervised drug injection facility; Dr. Greg Hobelmann, a physician at Baltimore’s Ashley Addiction Treatment; singer Simone Speed; author Clarence Brown; and clients of Powell Recovery Center, whose testimonials underscore the dangers of unsupervised drug use.

At the opening of the event, the Baltimore Harm Reduction Coalition will lead a 10-minute opioid overdose response training, after which attendees will receive a naloxone kit that makes it possible to save someone’s life from an opioid overdose.