Pubdate: Thu, 06 Jun 2013
Source: Abbotsford Times (CN BC)
Copyright: 2013 The Abbotsford Times
Contact:  http://www.abbotsfordtimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1009
Author: Gerda Peachey

PREVENTING NEEDLE EXCHANGE WAS RIGHT

Editor, the Times:

Despite the fact that the current mayor and council in Abbotsford 
favour caving in to the demands of Fraser Health and pressure from 
drug addicts, our city is now being sued by Pivot Legal Society. 
Peter Bernstein, their lawyer agrees that "Access to health care for 
drug users should not be up for a public vote."

We are talking here about illegal drug use.

Abbotsford is being pressured to provide clean needles and assorted 
paraphernalia to enable people trapped in the horror of addictions to 
stay in that trap.

When questioned as to where addicts will get the money to fill those 
nice clean, free needles, Fraser Health and their supporters give no answer.

But the answer is all around us - in the pilfered mail boxes, broken 
car doors and windows, vandalized homes and street thuggery.

Supplying addicts with the means to keep them in bondage to their 
addictions is wrong. What works is abstinence.

We need to give addicts help in housing, counselling, rehabilitation, 
but not freely hand them the tools of continued enslavement.

Fraser Health, and Pivot say that Abbotsford's attempt to stop needle 
exchange is the reason addicts have life-threatening diseases.

No. Abbotsford's policy is not to blame for the misery of drug 
addicts. The reason for those diseases and death is the degeneration 
of health that follows increasing drug use. Council was right to try 
to prevent needle-exchange.

People who climb out of the horror of addictions say that enabling 
their use just kept them in that bondage.

Drugs are illegal because they destroy lives.

To say, as the needle exchange proponents do, that we are denying 
health care, is to twist the meaning of those words.

Gerda Peachey Abbotsford
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom