Kathy Lambert has very different experience at injection site

Two King County council members left a safe injection site with very different impressions.

When Councilmember Jeanne Kohl-Welles relayed her experience at Vancouver B.C.’s Insite safe injection facility, she said she was surprised that it wasn’t the terrible, post-apocalyptic scene she thought it would be.

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Her colleague, Kathy Lambert, disagrees.

“I was appalled,” Lambert told Seattle’s Morning News. “I went in and there were bodies all over the floor. They were in various steps of being disheveled. They were everywhere. You are stepping over bodies.

“You go over to the desk and you give them your handle. It’s not your name. So there’s no way of tracking if Johnny Smith is doing better. Does he have medical issues we should be dealing with?”

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Lambert said that when she walked out the front door of the facility she saw a woman sitting on the ground shooting up three times in a row.

“I would describe the area around it as filthy, sad, depressing and officers there said that 5,000 needles are picked up there in that area every month,” Lambert said.

The council members visited two sites that day. The first was the Insite facility that many know about; the one that Lambert describes as “filthy, sad, and depressing.” The second facility was newer.

“We did go to another facility that was very clean, and very well put together,” Lambert said. “And very much involved in meeting people where they were and moving them on. However, I was very surprised about how many people had been taking drugs for so long and not moving up and out.”

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There was no goal to get addicts sober, Lambert said. Instead, they were more concentrated on cutting down on drug use — injecting three times a day instead of five, for example.

“It’s keeping people dependent, it’s hurting their bodies, it’s continuing them in a lifestyle where they are not living up to their full potential,” Lambert said. “The hardest thing was seeing these people not having a goal of getting clean and sober. With this we need to get people clean.”

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