ADDICTS DESERVE BETTER THAN INSITE

The federal government announced $10 million last week for new
programs to treat drug addiction in the Downtown Eastside.

Included in the spending is the opening of 20 new beds to offer
prostitutes a safe haven while helping them to beat the addictions
that forced them into prostitution.

The story didn't make it onto the front page of a single daily paper
in Vancouver.

In fact everyone buried it, in one case as a two-inch brief under a
short item about a suspicious looking drug bong in Saanich.

Funding to help prostitutes get off the street just isn't as juicy a
story as those about legalized brothels or red-light districts, nor
is it as fascinating as the question of whether the legalized drug
shooting gallery known as Insite will receive the legal extension so
long hoped for by some drug advocates.

At the press conference where the federal health minister announced
the drug funding, reporters asking questions focused almost entirely
on Insite instead.

They had some tough questions about whether the federal government
was using the announcement as a way to defer criticism should it
ultimately close Insite.

How odd. Drug addiction and prostitution are wreaking devastation in
the Downtown Eastside. The addictive lifestyles of drug addiction and
prostitution ensnare individuals in cycles of poverty, crime, and often death.

Yet when government announces a program to help drug addicted
prostitutes beat their addictions and get off the street, the
response is to ignore it and to ask why a program that has failed to
do what it was supposed to is not being further promoted.

The obvious reason, of course, is that programs that help individuals
beat the vices that enslave them don't fit the standard mould for
dealing with vices.

The zeal to have Insite's licence extended is more about backing away
from a prosecution approach to drugs than it is to helping addicts
beat their deadly habit.

It seems to me the arguments for and against Insite have always been misguided.

As with the issue of safe sex and condoms, the central question is
not how effective Insite is, although we may care about effectiveness
because we care about the people these "solutions" are aimed at.
Insite's future should be determined by its inherent qualities and
its overall impact on our society.

Purely on those points, it fails. It gives a green light to drug
abuse, hides a moral problem from public view, and helps fosters a
sense that drug addiction is under control as a public policy issue.

Even if Insite completely transformed the Downtown Eastside, as
opposed to actually contributing to the misery there, it would remain
the wrong approach, for precisely the same reason that moving your
Tylenol to the low shelf in your medicine cabinet is not the way to
prevent children from falling off a stool when reaching for the top shelf.

Unfortunately this is the way we've become accustomed to responding
to destructive behaviours. Rather than trying to prevent them, we're
content to mitigate the harm associated with them.

So instead of addressing prostitution, we promote red light
districts. Rather than teach drug awareness, we encourage
legalization. We throw condoms at children as an alternative to
abstinence. And when car thieves keep crashing while being pursued by
police, we tell the police not to give chase any more.

Christian charity requires that we exhibit compassion in our lives.
It calls us to go out in search of the lost sheep and to rescue them,
not to simply pat them on the head while they go astray.

It means finding ways so the sheep don't go astray, rather than
telling the shepherd not to rescue them.

Insite has moved a public drug horror indoors, rendering it
"Outofsite." Turning it into a more comfortable procedure as far as
we're concerned, however, also helps to absolve us of responsibility
to help addicts.

The federal government's approach to drugs and prostitution makes
much more sense than Insite's does, from a moral and a practical perspective.