Throughout the city, an injection of new life into tired areas and a fusion of Afro and European styles in others, has led to a metamorphosis from Johannesburg to "Jozi", a name affectionately coined by locals.
Insite operates in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, a poor neighborhood that is home to about a third of the city's 12,000 injection substance abusers.
Insite, located in Vancouver's downtown east side one of the poorest neighbourhoods in Canada, home to about a third of the city's 12,000 injection drug users averages 1,028 visits per day.
The research was led by Dr. Mark Lysyshn, medical health officer at Vancouver Mental Health in that city's supervised injection facility (SIF), called Insite, and included around 1,000 tested drug samples.
Insite, the city's safe injection facility and the first of its kind in North America has found that 86percentt of drugs it tested from July to August contained fentanyl, which is more potent than heroin and around 100 times stronger than morphine.
In particular, high rates are seen among Aboriginal persons – both on and off reserve as well as among the foreign born and marginalized inner city populations, especially injection drug users [ 5- 8].
The city provides a supervised injection site and conducts regular needle sweeps in high drug-use neighbourhoods.
While Vancouver has always been a North American leader in harm reduction programs, it's tough to say how other cities would handle unsanctioned injection sites.
While federal law prohibits safe injection sites, cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Seattle are considering sites modeled after ones in Canada, Europe and Australia, even in the face of threats from Rosenstein and the Department of Justice to crack down on any site that does open. .
These were players who enabled the City reinvention to gain an injection of high-calibre credibility.
