SAFE SHOOTING GALLERIES GOOD IDEA

Safe houses for drug addicts. Places where users can shoot up using sterile
needles and clean water. That's what an editorial in the Aug. 21 edition of
the Canadian Medical Association Journal advocates.

Using the mean streets of Vancouver -- where addicts shoot up in plain
sight, often using dirty water from puddles -- as an example of the need,
the journal proposes "safer" injection facilities where addicts would be
offered primary health care and counselling to get them off drugs and off
the street.

Note that the journal uses the word "safer" because, of course, when you're
talking drugs of unknown origin, the word "safe" loses all meaning.

Also note that Canada would not be first in opening such facilities; 45
such houses operate in several European countries, including Switzerland,
the Netherlands and Germany, with a trial facility now open in Australia.

Why do it? That's the first question.

How do the words hepatitis C and HIV sound?

Anyone who thinks either disease can be contained within a certain segment
of the population -- drug users or gays -- is stark raving stupid. These
are not polite diseases which recognize boundaries of any kind. Instead,
they leap from gays to straights to non-drug users to the newborn with
blithe alacrity, not pausing for a second to acknowledge the morality,
religion, skin colour, sexual preference or gender of their victims.

Anything, anything at all, that we can do to curtail such diseases has to
be worth it. And for those poised to scream "Abstinence is the answer,"
don't bother. Abstinence from sex and "just saying no" to drugs do not mean
much to the newborn who comes into the world HIV positive. What is
abstinence to the woman who in 20 years of marriage has never slept with
anyone other than her husband and who goes to her doctor because she's been
feeling tired, only to be told she is HIV positive? Now she has to deal
with the horror of perhaps developing full blown AIDS as well as the
terrible knowledge that her husband has been deceiving her. Abstinence does
nothing for our teenage drug users who, when they come home to us from the
street, already have hepatitis C. Abstinence is a nice word and that's all
it is.

Were I one of those mothers with a kid on the streets shooting up, I most
assuredly would want the small comfort of knowing that my son or daughter
could go to a "safer" injection facility.

Once drug addicts have contracted diseases, they cost our already
over-burdened medical system thousands of dollars more to treat than do
non-addicted patients.

Those, then, are the practical reasons for the creation of drug-user
facilities.

What of moral concerns?

It was only yesterday that the CMA published its editorial, and already
I've received irate letters to the editor insisting that such a practice
would be sure to encourage drug use. This is, of course, the same silly
argument used to condemn any suggestion that we make birth control
available to teenagers. Better they should embrace abstinence than each
other, say some. Access to birth control will just encourage young people
to have sex, others bleat. They totally ignore the fact the sexually active
teenager is a fact of life. They totally ignore the fact the sight of a
condom is more likely to turn kids -- and adults -- off rather than on.
(Ditto drug paraphernalia). And they totally ignore the fact there is an
element of punishment in our self-righteous attitudes towards sex and drugs.

Somehow, we want those little teenage brats, especially the girls, to
suffer if they have sex. Serves them right if they get pregnant. Somehow we
want them all to suffer if they do drugs. Serves them right if they get
hepatitis C or become HIV positive.

No, it doesn't. That sort of attitude is barbaric. And mean. And uncivilized.

And if pregnancy and death serve people right if they do sex and drugs,
then we should all suffer for our mistakes.

I told a lie last week and I got away with it. It was a relatively small
lie and it hurt no one, but it was a lie. And what about the time I stole a
pair of jeans (I was much younger, of course, and since I'd never
shoplifted, I had to prove I could do it, didn't I?)? I got away with it, too.

Somehow, the cost benefits of opening up safer drug facilities pale in
comparison to the benefits to human life. If such institutions result in
getting one addict off the streets, then there is one fewer addict today
than there was yesterday.

That's what counts.