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Training Guide

Alternatives to Public Injections

“The key to their success has been in cooperation, coordinated efforts, local participation, and a commitment to creating a safer and healthier community for everyone.” 

Although the SIFs and their histories varied in details and contexts, some major themes were common throughout all of them. The key to their success has been in cooperation, coordinated efforts, local participation, and a commitment to creating a safer and healthier community for everyone. Wherever they are located, programs that provide a supervised, safe place for people to come off the streets and use their drugs all showed benefits to the people who use them and to the community around them: 

1. People who use SIFs take better care of themselves, reduce or eliminate their needle sharing, use their drugs more safely, and ultimately reduce their drug use; 
2. SIF participants gain access to other medical and social services and entry into drug treatment; 
3. There has not been a single overdose death in any of these programs over many years of operation and many thousands of supervised injections; 
4. SIFs do not increase drug use in the area, nor do they encourage young people to initiate drug use; 
5. Crime and public nuisance decrease in the areas around these programs.