THE RIGHT TO SHOOT UP

Some critics will undoubtedly fear that a court ruling this week on
Vancouver's safe injection site has created a constitutional right
for addicts to shoot up. The fear might not be misplaced.

Court rulings are a bit like loaded weapons: How they are used -- or
misused -- depends on who's brandishing them. Certainly, those who
advocate permissive approaches to drug regulation feel they've won the lottery.

Justice Ian Pitfield, in his 60 page ruling, declared that sections
of Canada's laws prohibiting possession and trafficking of drugs are
unconstitutional because they deny addicts "health care services that
would ameliorate the effects of their condition." In other words,
sites where addicts can safely inject drugs such as Insite in
Vancouver's notorious downtown east side are the equivalent of health
care for addicts.

Justice Pitfield, who sits on the British Columbia Supreme Court,
gave the federal government until June 30, 2009 to fix the law and
granted Insite an immediate exemption, allowing it to stay open.

Clearly, the judge believes that Vancouver's experimental safe
injection site is an appropriate response to the public health crisis
created by drug addiction in the city, where HIV, tuberculosis,
hepatitis and syphilis are all byproducts of the problem. The judge
is probably right in his assessment, but no one elected him to any
legislature. The federal government's fear of safe injection sites
may be wrongheaded, but it doesn't give courts the right to override
elected officials and set national drug policy.

Insite has long been a thorn in the side of Stephen Harper's
government, whose just-say-no approach to drugs is at odds with the
harm reduction approach the Vancouver site represents.

Despite mounting evidence that Insite was doing what it was designed
to do -- lessen a public health crisis without the negative
side-effects critics had warned of, such as increased crime -- the
federal government has avoided making a decision about its future. As
Citizen writer and drug policy expert Dan Gardner wrote on these
pages recently, it's becoming increasingly clear that the
Conservative government's distaste for safe injection sites is
grounded in ideology rather than science.

Justice Pitfield's ruling has gotten the Harper government off the
hook. Health Minister Tony Clement is an intelligent and decent man,
and his instinct may well have been to listen to the medical experts
and let the site continue operation, if it weren't for the fact that
doing so could make the Tories look too liberal and thus alienate
some of the party's political base. Now Mr. Clement will be able to
say the courts made him do it, the same way politicians were able to
say it was the courts that allowed same sex marriage.

Politicians are elected to make difficult decisions. When the courts
usurp that role, they also erase the electorate's right to hold
politicians accountable. Politicians ought to have the right to make
bad decisions, such as opposing safe injection sites. The public then
has a chance to fire those politicians at election time.

The federal government is now faced with the task of amending drug
laws so that safe injection sites such as Insite are no longer
illegal; that is, the government has been ordered to draft a drug
policy that has been dictated to it and for which it has no appetite.

A constitutional democracy is still supposed to be a democracy, but
it's sometimes hard to tell.