Pubdate: Wed, 08 Jun 2005
Source: Penticton Western (CN BC)
Copyright: 2005 Penticton Western
Contact:  http://www.pentictonwesternnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1310
Author: Tom Fletcher
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Safe Injecting Rooms)

'SAFE INJECTION SITE' TERM AN OUTRIGHT LIE

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. This was just a convenient 
place to hold a public meeting, really.

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 counselling and 78 to detox programs. But they 
don't know how many people actually got off drugs, or even 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.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom