SAFE HAVEN FOR ADDICTS IS A FORM OF SURRENDER

We would be hard-pressed to disagree with those who would condemn the idea
of establishing supervised safe injection rooms, where drug addicts could
shoot up their own cocaine or heroin with sterile needles and clean water.
The idea is raised in the current issue of the Canadian Medical Association
Journal, in which an editorial calls for safe injection facilities. That
editorial accompanies two research reports and a commentary that illustrate
the horrific impact of injection drug use in Vancouver. Those studies show
that users still commonly share needles, clog hospitals and suffer an
appalling rate of fatal overdoses. Injection facilities would reduce
sharing of needles, the authors say, and thereby slow the terrible rates of
HIV and Hepatitis C infection. As well, supervised facilities would reduce
deaths by overdose.

But has it come to this? That our society would tacitly condone illegal
drug use by providing the place, the facilities and the security and safety
of supervision? What message does this send to our children: That drugs are
very, very bad -- but if you use them, we'll give you a safe place to do so?

A case can be made that dangerous and disease-ridden alleys and shooting
galleries are where heroin and cocaine use belongs. Perhaps that's a good
message to give anyone considering heroin or cocaine use: This is where you
will end up. This is how you will live. This is how you will die.

Use of illegal drugs is hugely destructive to individuals and their
families, is enormously costly to society in terms of health care, the
justice system and lost productivity, and is accompanied by a culture of
violence. Injection facilities would be seen as a moral and legal surrender
to illegal drug use and much of what goes with it.

Too, we live in a time in which social-welfare and health-care programs are
scrabbling to maintain existing funding, let alone find money for
increasing demand or for new initiatives. It is difficult, verging on the
impossible, to justify spending limited public money on the space,
facilities and staff for injection facilities when other programs that do
not assist in an illegal activity so badly need it. That, together with
concerns of implicitly legitimizing behaviour that is both criminal and
destructive, would be one of our strongest objections: Safe injection
facilities simply don't rank against competing priorities for funding.

But look at the numbers:

* 100,000 Canadians inject cocaine or heroin.

* One third of new cases of HIV infection and almost two-thirds of
Hepatitis C infection result from injection drug use.

* In B.C., drug overdose is the leading cause of death of people 30 to 49
- -- even among people with HIV.

This is a crisis. And the people most at risk in that crisis are, in
essence, outlaws. There is a moral distance, albeit an arguably legitimate
one, between "them" and "us."

It is time and it is right to have this discussion: Not to decide whether
to continue the "war on drugs" but to decide if compassion for its
casualties has to necessarily be a form of surrender, as this idea is.