Should Cities Offer Safe Sites for Injection Drug Users?

City health officials and addiction experts took the first steps Thursday toward opening the nation's only government-sponsored injection room that would give drug addicts a safe, clean place to shoot up. Hoping to reduce San Francisco's high rate of fatal drug overdoses, the local public health department co-sponsored a symposium on the only such facility in North America, a 4-year-old Vancouver site where an estimated 700 users a day self-administer narcotics under the supervision of nurses.