Pubdate: Mon, 27 Jun 2005
Source: North Island Gazette (CN BC)
Copyright: 2005 North Island Gazette
Contact:  http://www.northislandgazette.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/2783
Author: Tom Fletcher
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm (Heroin)

SHOOT-UP SITES NOT HELPING ADDICTS

Victoria is the second city in B.C. to get in line for the brave new 
world of safe injection sites," as they are persistently referred to 
in the mainstream media.

If it goes ahead, our quaint old capital will also be the second city 
in Canada to embrace this trendy European strategy. Or North America 
for that matter, since so far only Vancouver has taken the plunge. 
Once this questionable bit of social engineering spreads to two 
cities, look for it to pop up in other B.C. communities that have a 
significant hard drug problem, which is to say most of them. They're 
already talking about it in Kamloops.

The idea of inviting junkies off the street to a nurse-supervised 
clinical environment was nurtured for years in the hothouse of 
Vancouver city politics, where the last election was decided mainly 
on urgent demands to do something" about the horror show of dealers 
and dopers haunting the streets of Vancouver. Like many debates in 
our largest city, this one develops in a fog of euphemisms and jargon 
that are calculated to avoid the tough questions.

The term safe injection site" isn't just a euphemism. It's an 
outright lie. You'll notice that doctors and senior bureaucrats say 
supervised injection site." They're not foolish enough to call these 
places safe. The heroin or cocaine that is used there is bought from 
the same street dealers who have always provided it, and there are no 
efforts to test its potency, its purity or for that matter its drain 
cleaner or mouse poison content.

The Orwellian language continues to evolve as Victoria city officials 
try to stick-handle this issue through a series of neighbourhood 
meetings. They're safe consumption facilities" and contact points" 
and they're certainly not planned for this neighbourhood. My first 
question was, why Victoria? The place has its share of drug problems, 
no doubt, but it hardly swarms with nodded-out junkies and its 
car-theft rate is seldom in the headlines. Heck, even the panhandlers 
are cleaner and more polite than most places I've seen.

Why not Surrey, or New Westminster, or Burnaby, or Prince George, 
where street prostitution and urban crime are more prevalent?

Well, the city and the Vancouver Island Health Authority got a 
$50,000 grant from Health Canada so now they've got to spend it. 
Victoria Mayor Alan Lowe recently left his city's teeming slums to 
take the obligatory fact-finding tour of Bern, Switzerland and the 
red-light district of Frankfurt, where he was impressed by the array 
of medical, social work and housing support for addicts. The European 
tour confirmed that local residents have noticed less drug activity 
on the streets, where public parks had been taken over by 
free-for-all drug dealing and shooting up.

Massive expenditure of public funds creates a superficial perception 
of cleaner streets that pays off at the polls. That's great if you're 
a politician. It's not so good if you're a junkie.

MP Randy White, a long-time critic of injection sites, pointed out 
last year that overdose deaths actually went up after InSite opened 
in Vancouver. Billy Weselowski, who runs abstinence-based treatment 
programs in the Lower Mainland, said he hadn't received a single 
referral from InSite.

InSite officials now say that between March and August of 2004, they 
made 262 referrals to addiction counseling and 78 to detox programs. 
But they don't know how many people actually got off drugs, or if 
they even really tried.

Here's the big problem with shoot-up sites, and giving away heroin 
for that matter. This approach doesn't help people get off drugs. It 
helps them keep using.
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MAP posted-by: Beth