He was not hosed or shampooed, he was fed oats, lucerne, tick beans, sun-flower seeds and calf manna, with very little corn.

He was never near a syringe or a vitamin supplement, and if his trainer Vic Rail had had his way, his hooves would never have felt the farrier’s blow. With a thin, patchy coat that needed sump oil to protect it from the Queensland sun. Nicknamed Erky, he was always a curious looking animal. Vo Rogue was one of those gallopers for which the description “freak” is no exaggeration, the product of parents who never won a race between them, Vo Rogue fetched the princely sum of $5,000 as a weanling, which looked no bargain as he grew into a slow and ungainly juvenile with little interest in running. No heart! Six years later the little bay with no heart in him had 16 Group wins, a string of track records, a devoted public and a small matter of $2.93 million in the bank. Since 2014, they’ve been collecting survey data from users of an unsanctioned injection site in the United States, and they’re finding similar results as studies in Europe.When Vo Rogue was gelded the veterinary surgeon who performed the operation looked down at his 11-month old patient struggling to come out of the anaesthetic, and decided the horse had no heart in him. But this is precisely what makes the work of Peter Davidson, Andrea Lopez, and Alex Kral - veteran harm reduction researchers - all the more novel. People opposed to supervised injection sites will often argue that Europe and America are too different, and that such studies are not relevant. This is despite dozens of empirical evaluations of over 100 supervised injections sites across 10 European countries showing that these spaces save lives, reduce public injection, and function as a gateway to other vital services, including addiction treatment. And as with syringe exchange programs, government officials and community members fear that supervised injection sites will encourage people to use drugs. And yet, just as with the AIDS epidemic, the government has been slow to implement public health policies that could save these lives. People from all walks of life are dying preventable deaths - more than 100 every day - at the peak of their lives. What if Mike wasn’t alone? What if he had a space to safely use? A space where he wasn’t judged and shamed a space where he could talk about why, after years of recovery, he went back to the needle? The opioid crisis is indeed the AIDS epidemic of our time. He’ll be counted as one among tens of thousands who died in 2017, which is expected to surpass the death rate from 2016. Just two weeks ago in Chicago, my friend Mike, a 27-year-old getting his master’s in social work at the University of Chicago, died from an overdose. These aren’t just numbers from a government report.

Having reported on the overdose crisis for years, I fear these deaths aren’t being comprehended. For context, that’s more people dead than during the peak of the AIDS epidemic in 2005. In 2016, over 60,000 people in the US died from drug overdoses, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Streets of rogue syringes