Purpose and goals of DCRs
Key goals of DCRs
- Ensure survival
- Increase social integration
- Reduce risks and harms from 'risk environments'
- Enable access to resources and prevent disease transmission
- Provide safer and more hygienic spaces for drug use
The history and goals of DCR
The primary goal of DCRs is to reduce the morbidity and mortality of people who use drugs (PWUD) by providing a safer environment for drug use and training clients in safer forms of drug use. But the idea goes way beyond by enabling to connect individuals to additional care services: medical, mental health, social, and legal. In a broader context DCRs are part of the community response to social issues.
By giving people who use drugs the opportunity to consume in a calm, hygienic, and supervised environment DCRs also aim to reduce harms resulting from the broader ‘risk environment’ that socially marginalised or excluded groups may be exposed to. Providing people with sterile equipment prevents them from spreading blood-borne diseases (like HIV, Hepatitis C, or Hepatitis B). Such intervention is much cheaper than treating these diseases and does not increase the number of people who use drugs. Trained staff can react in case of an overdose, saving people's lives.
It allows people that would take the substances anyway to do it in monitored conditions, and not in the public eye.
Country example: North Richmond (Victoria, Australia)
The injecting room was opened in 2018 in response to a rise in heroin-related deaths in the area, including several near the local primary school. To address this issue and remove public injecting from the streets, it was decided to locate the facility nearby, not without opposition from the residents.
The injecting room in North Richmond and the programs its community health centre offers, including housing support and oral and mental health services. In 2023, DCR was decided to become permanent.
https://nrch.com.au/services/medically-supervised-injecting-room/
Drug consumption rooms are often among the first places where insights can be gained into new drug use patterns, and, thus, they also can have a role to play in the early identification of new and emerging trends among high-risk populations using their services. People who use drugs are best informed about the drug situation so their information can be very important.
Although very important, DCRs are not the intervention that can solve all the topics related to drug problems. Drug use is a complex topic that requires a complex approach and cooperation of different services from different cross-cutting areas including mental health, public health, social inclusion, employment and economic support services, law enforcement and criminal justice, employment and economic support services, family and child welfare services, peer support and community outreach.
Introducing Vista – a German organisation that helps people who use drugs