Pubdate: Mon, 24 Nov 2008 Source: Prince George Citizen (CN BC) Copyright: 2008 Prince George Citizen Contact: http://www.princegeorgecitizen.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/350 Author: Frank Peebles Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites) ADDICTS DEFEND CRACK PIPE POLICY Some recovering addicts are now defending local harm-reduction services, such as the needle exchange, in the wake of another former addicts criticisms that they don't really help. Two former full-time drug users, who are now productive members of society, say services such as the needle exchange, methadone prescriptions and clean crack pipes are preventing even more social decay than what we are witnessing in the area today. "The crime rate would go up without the needle exchange," said a woman we'll call Anita, who used to work for organized crime as a crackshack operator. "I totally agree with the needle exchange. I was born into a life of drugs, I had close relatives who were heroin addicts and I got hooked, too. Kids in all walks of life get hooked, but it is important to have a place you can refer them to where they can do something about getting their lives turned around again, have a place they feel safe, have a place with a nurse, a place that understands and isn't judging them, but is trying to look out for them." She said the public could expect break-and-enters and car thefts and muggings to go up, if it weren't for the services. She added there would be more sex workers forced out on the street, more beatings over debts and territory, more crackshacks in neighbourhoods, and there would be direct targeting of doctors' and pharmacists' and veterinarians' homes and offices, all to get the needles they need and whatever else they could score as well. A former addict we'll call Henry, agrees wholeheartedly. He almost smoked himself into financial ruin, and his family along with him. He was stealing things from his relatives and friends to pay for his constant habit, until they intervened at a rare moment of lucidity and he took their offer of help. He has been drug-free almost ever since thanks to constant help. Some people don't have such influential loved ones, he said, and that's where a social safety net has to step in. "I've agreed with the harm reduction approach from the start, but I now know it has to be part and parcel with a collective program," Henry said. "You need the police on board, you need the health care community on board. You need a community of experiential people on board, you need the public at large to buy in and believe in it. You have to explain the goals first, all the benefits, educate people about what the costs are of not having an effective program to reduce harm. You have to demonstrate the social and the fiscal advantages of it, they are absolutely there so it shouldn't be too hard, but I have not seen that correct approach in this city. This satanic ignorance that I see in this town is only going to make the situation worse. 'It's not going to touch me or my family, and we shouldn't help people because they did this to themselves' is satanic ignorance." He stressed that the point of the needle exchange and crack pipes in particular is not and never has been to somehow get addicts off of drugs. The primary purpose is, and it is a real threat in his experience, is to curb the spread of diseases. "Hep C (hepatitis) and HIV and AIDS will, sooner or later, jump over from the drug users to mainstream families," he said. "Part of that satanic ignorance is not realizing that there are all kinds of contact points between those two worlds, there is no 'us and them,' and when it does jump you'll have a real problem to contend with. You can have dozens of people, hundreds of people, infected before you realize the first one is, and by then you can't backtrack. You can't discover the source. You can't do anything except try to deal with the infected people as they show up, and they are still spreading it to others all the while. It cannot be allowed to jump into schools and families. It cannot. You must deal with this by putting the whole force of policy into the harm reduction model." We already do in so many cases, he said. The counterattack campaign against impaired drivers, the warning labels on cigarettes, the gambling helpline signs at casinos, these are all harm reduction tools already in action. They are actions that accept someone is taking part in an activity they know is harmful but they are involved in it anyway and they need society's help. "There are a lot of really good people mixed up in drugs," said Anita. "Some people in the drug world have no morals, but a lot are worth saving, worth spending time with. I heard (in a recent Citizen story) about addicts breaking needles off in playgrounds and parks and I tell you, heaven help anyone I ever was with if they did something like that. A lot of people in that world would do that, I know, but a lot of us still had honour and still knew what morals were. The reason you do the drugs is because you have morals, and something so terrible has happened to you or something so bad has been lost that you do it to forget or fill that void. There is goodness in those people." Anita is on the methadone program in Prince George and says she intends to be for the rest of her life. It's like a diabetic needs insulin, she explained, the methadone takes the edge off her heroin cravings without all the nasty ups and downs. For that she is grateful, or she probably wouldn't have made it through and by now all kinds of terrible things could have happened to her in the street world, she said. Henry was to the point he had lost his occupation, been alienated from most of his family and was inhaling upwards of $80 per day in crack cocaine, a total that was set to skyrocket and in the process send him straight into the gutters and alleys, he said. He was already pawning his clothing and working for a dial-a-dope gang to pay for it. "We all want to be loved, we all feel affection for our families or wish for it, we all have hopes for our lives, even those people you see laying in the garbage," he said. "It is marginalizing these people, pushing them further away from help and the embrace of society that is the real problem. We are so lucky, so lucky, to have a provincial government in this province that sees that and employs a harm reduction model." - --- MAP posted-by: Larry Seguin