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Miss Shark
10-20-2007, 02:00 PM
I read this on another board, and thought I'd post it here.

http://www.ktvu.com/news/14372284/detail.html

"Drug overdoses represented about one of every seven emergency calls handled by city paramedics between July 2006 and July 2007, according to San Francisco Fire Department Capt. Niels Tangherlini."]Drug overdoses represented about one of every seven emergency calls handled by city paramedics between July 2006 and July 2007, according to San Francisco Fire Department Capt. Niels Tangherlini.

Some snippets:

Hoping to reduce San Francisco's high rate of fatal drug overdoses, the local public health department co-sponsored a symposium on the only such facility in North America, a 4-year-old Vancouver site where an estimated 700 users a day self-administer narcotics under the supervision of nurses.

Colfax estimated that there are between 11,000 and 15,000 intravenous drug users in San Francisco, most of them homeless men. Like many large U.S. cities, the city operates a clean needle exchange program to reduce HIV and Hepatitis C infections.

Drug overdoses represented about one of every seven emergency calls handled by city paramedics between July 2006 and July 2007, according to San Francisco Fire Department Capt. Niels Tangherlini.

Sway are you aware of the one n Vancouver? Being a nurse what are your thoughts on this?

I've gotta say I'll support anything that will help our homeless and over crowded jails. I think it's a start albeit a small one. We go along way in this country if we could just learn to take care of our mentally ill, and not over crowd our jails with people on minor drug offences.

sway2sway
10-20-2007, 05:16 PM
yeah. about every 6 months or year, they have to jump through hoops to get the funding extended. I think it's a great thing. I don't think having a safe place to shoot up is encouraging drug use, it's reducing the harm already inherant. For this marginalized population this is the only link to actual preventative services--services which can reduce the number of costly interventions if it is left to escalate into a crisis. For example a nurse might identify an abscess beginning to develop, be able to assist the person to get antibiotics or whatever, early intervention could nip in the bud a potential sepsis in such an immunologically compromised individual (ICU, costing the taxpayers (well in canada) thousands of dollars a day). not to mention saving lives. and you might say what does it matter? But I'd prefer to live in a society where there is always a thread for someone to grab onto no matter how far gone they seem, how beyond hope they seem, and no matter how many bridges they've burned in the past. And I guess lots of times they're never gonna reach for that thread, but I can imagine how I'd feel if the whole world gave up on me.

that's a little like a sermon, huh?