Pubdate: Tue, 07 Jun 2005 Source: Peace Arch News (CN BC) Copyright: 2005 Peace Arch News Contact: http://www.peacearchnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1333 Author: Tom Fletcher Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Safe Injecting Rooms) VICTORIA NEXT TO GET A SHOOT-UP SITE 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 used there is bought from the same street dealers who have always provided it, and there are no efforts to test its potency. 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. Heck, even the panhandlers are cleaner and more polite than most places I've seen. Why not Surrey, or New Westminster, or Burnaby, 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 residents there 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. 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 counselling and 78 to detox programs. But they don't know how many people actually got off drugs, or if they 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. - --- MAP posted-by: Josh