Despite thirty published evaluation reports citing the effectiveness of Vancouver’s safe
injection site (Small 2008), the Canadian federal government refuses to endorse safe
injection sites as a health service option available to injection drug users (IDUs). Insite’ s
evaluation results are undergoing debate, because two communicative spheres of knowledge,
each with a unique authoritative language, are conflicting as each is attempting to gain moral
authority over the right to recontextualize drug users. Drawing on a literature review of two
harm reduction programs in Vancouver, Insite and Sheway, and expert interviews with
evaluators, I show that what constitutes “evidence” is in fact subjective, determined by
spheres of communicability that are built upon social, professional and political contexts. To
confront the problematic nature of this issue, I suggest that evaluators and overseers need to
treat program evaluation as a process of negotiation, best approached in a fluid manner. By
obscuring multiple user experiences in the evaluation of harm reduction programs, evaluators
and overseers risk imposing their communicative ideologies on what it means to be a drug
user.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/5115 |
| Date | 11 1900 |
| Creators | Robbins, Stephen Delbert |
| Publisher | University of British Columbia |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
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