A HARMFUL AND RIDICULOUS CONCEPT

Here's a concept: Your closest friend is a raging alcoholic. He/she
can't hold a job, can't look after his family, can't really look
after himself, and has only one real - and constant - interest; i.e.
where does the next drink come from.

So, as a humane person and true friend, what do you do to help? Easy.
Get a government grant, build a little bedroom/bathroom/sitting room
on the side of your house, and ply him with all the booze he wants.

What's that you say? Feeding his habit won't help him but will only
make him worse. He'll never get rid of his addiction but will only
spiral deeper and deeper into a cesspool of despair.

Only a complete wingnut would come up with a scheme to enable his
addiction rather than help him break out of it.

All of which, of course, is true. The entire concept is ridiculous.
Not to mention harmful.

Which leads to the ongoing national debate on a different addiction,
i.e., hard drugs, in Vancouver, pitting the so-called "harm
reduction" advocates - those who want Ottawa to keep funding that
city's free drug haven for addicts, against those who believe that
enabling addicts to feed their addiction doesn't do a thing to help
them get off the needle.

As you'd expect, most of the mainstream media in this country has
sided with the champions of Insite, Vancouver's costly injection
site, and attacked Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Health Minister
Tony Clement for their refusal to renew funding which was - surprise,
surprise - initially provided by a previous Liberal administration.

Harper, Clement et al are routinely attacked by the Insite backers
for basing their opposition to continuing the cesspool which
Vancouver's drug area has become on their own "ideology," rather than
on the so-called "facts" of the case.

The "facts," of course, are those details which Insite apologists
consider acceptable, based mainly on a series of studies conducted by
people with a direct interest in maintaining this failed experiment.

Just as an aside, this very Canadian habit of accusing people of
relying on "ideology" has long bemused this writer. It is leveled by
those who also are exercising their own "ideology" yet, because they
disagree with it, it becomes a bad thing for say the Tories to be
ideological but a good thing for their critics to be ideological.
That's because - as the critics see it at least - Tory ideology
doesn't have good intentions, while anti-Tory ideology is the salt of
the earth.

But back to Insite.

The supporters of that program claim that providing clean needles for
the addicts actually saves lives. It may prolong the lives of some
junkies, but regular shootingup of hard drugs, whether the needles
are clean or not, ultimately will kill them.

The only realistic way to save their lives - and even this is not
guaranteed - is to get them into rehab immediately and get them off the junk.

But there's little time and even less money in the Vancouver
experiment to provide beds for rehabilitation. Instead, most of the
cash is used facilitating the junkies lethal habits.

The champions of Insite claim that their program is one of "harm
reduction." Nonsense. What they are saying in effect is that these
people are going to kill themselves anyway, but by offering them a
place to shoot up we're reducing the overall harm on society.

This is seen as the "humane" approach to drugs, while those - like
this writer - who think the emphasis should be on getting them off
the drugs completely, rather than continuing to feed their habit, are
seen as hard-hearted, uncaring Neandrathals completely blinded by
their warped "ideology."

You don't have to be a medical doctor, a scientist, a social worker
or even a left-leaning politician to be able to understand that
helping somebody continue their lethal addiction isn't exactly a big
help to their well-being.

Yet that's what the advocates of so-called "harm reduction" want us
to believe; that they are following the right course of action and
anybody who dares disagree with their "wisdom" is a cad. Or worse.

Despite the obvious idiocy of facilitating addicts - and thanks to an
extremely sympathetic Vancouver media - the politically popular thing
for Ottawa to do would bed to continue to fund this absurd program.

But the right thing to do would be to junk the entire concept and
instead put the money into serious rehabilitation programs. To be
sure, not everybody can be or wants to be rehabilitated: but even if
it just saves a few lives, it's preferable to funding death by a
thousand needles.