SHOOTING UP IS A CHARTER RIGHT?

Let me get this straight. Last week, a B.C. judge ruled that
Vancouver's safe-injection site - where drug addicts can shoot up
under the watchful eye of government health workers - is legal. The
federal government, he said, has no right to end the temporary
exemption that allows the site to operate.

So far, so good, I guess. But Mr. Justice Ian Pitfield did a whole
lot more than that. He created a constitutional right for addicts to
shoot up. First, he defined the program as health care - on the
grounds that addicts have a disease, and need their fix, just as
diabetics need theirs. He went on to rule that denial of health care
is a violation of Section 7 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
which says: "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of
the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in
accordance with the principles of fundamental justice."

Well, that does raise the stakes.

For the record, I think any city that wants a safe-injection site
should be allowed to have one. But I doubt Pierre Trudeau ever
imagined the Charter would be invoked to justify state-run shooting galleries.

The judge's ruling opens a mighty can of worms. If safe shooting is a
right, then shouldn't every addict be entitled to it? Toronto's more
progressive politicians are hopeful. "We already have a lot of safe
consumption sites in the city of Toronto," Councillor Gord Perks
pointed out. "They're called bars."

True enough. But last time I checked, alcohol was legal. Most people
don't have to steal or sell sex to get it. In general, it enhances
lives. Nor is it supplied by gangster cartels. Perhaps Mr. Perks
really does think a hit of crack is no worse than a nice glass of
pinot, in which case I'd love to know what kinds of chats he has with
his teenage kids.

The parallels being drawn between drug addiction and
non-self-inflicted illnesses are equally bizarre. I think we can all
agree addiction is not a crime. But it's not exactly diabetes either.
For starters, diabetics didn't get that way by injecting themselves
with life-destroying drugs. Nor will they get better by injecting
more of what made them sick in the first place. And even though many
addicts are slaves to their addiction, at some stage there was an
element of choice. With persistence, luck and treatment, some even
overcome their disease.

Insite's proponents believe we need to stop moralizing, and
de-stigmatize addiction. They also believe the hard-core cases who
make their way to Insite are basically incurable (which may be true).
But they ignore a highly inconvenient fact. Stigmatization works.

If you doubt it, consider cigarette smoking and drunk driving, two
once prevalent behaviours now marginalized by intensive public-health
campaigns. Thanks to stigmatization, smokers are viewed as a social
menace. They are blamed for inflicting harm not only on themselves
but on others, as well as on an overburdened health-care system.
We've also made it harder for them to get and use their drug of
choice. Rather than be shamed and exiled from polite society,
millions of smokers have managed to quit, and other people never took it up.

Some experts believe cigarettes are harder to kick than heroin. So
should we stop blaming smokers for their filthy, harmful, expensive
habit? Of course not! Nor would we attempt to argue that somebody
addicted to cigarettes (or alcohol) has a constitutional right to the
next smoke (or drink).

And so we have arrived at a peculiar place, where smokers are
officially regarded as a scourge, but junkies just can't help
themselves. We have widespread public-health programs to warn
teenagers of the perils of tobacco and AIDS, but hardly any to show
them what happens to guys who start shooting heroin for kicks, or
girls who become crack whores. Oh no. We can't do that. That's way
too moralistic. And everybody knows it would never, never work.