DCRs –
What are they?
Aims and goals

Regardless of the nomenclature used, DCRs are legally sanctioned and professionally supervised health care facilities that provide safer and more hygienic conditions for PWUD to consume pre-obtained drugs in a non-judgemental environment that reduces the health and social harmsassociated with such activities in public spaces and facilitates and promotes voluntary access to social, health, economic, legal and drug treatment services.

Drug Consumption Rooms are also known by many other names, including Safe Injecting Facilities [SFIs], Safe Injecting Sites [SIS], Supervised Injecting Centres [SCIs], Supervised Drug Consumption Facilities [SDCFs] and Medically Supervised Injecting Centres [MSICs], among others.

 

Across existing DCRs, some of the most common goals of such facilities are:

      • Prevent death by oversight of drug administration and immediate resuscitation of an individual experiencing a drug overdose.
      • Reduce drug use and related nuisance, including crime, in public spaces.
      • Reduce transmission of HIV, HCV and other blood borne diseases through the provision of sterile drug use equipment and related paraphernalia.
      • Enable testing for communicable diseases, such as HIV, HCV, STIs, and TB.
      • Reach the most marginalised and underserved people who use drugs, who do not access to other services.
      • Provide primary physical and mental health care and to promote safer approaches to drug use.
      • Promote voluntary access to other types of support such as health, housing, social, economic, and legal services, and evidence-based drug detoxification and treatment.
      • Provide specialised support to women who use drugs, sex workers who use drugs, neuronal and physically diverse people who use drugs, people experiencing homeless that use drugs, among others.
      • Provide ‘real-time’ drug market monitoring data to alert people who use drugs harm reduction service providers, public health professionals, academic researchers, and law enforcement of highly potent or adulterated batches of drugs circulating in the community that have unintended effects when taken.