PRAGMATISM OVER PRINCIPLE

Toronto's Drug Policy: A Debate

The City of Toronto is right to study the feasibility of supervised
consumption sites under its drug strategy. Since criminal sanctions
against drug use have failed to arrest the problem, and since most
people are unable to get their heads around the alternative of
legalizing hard drugs, consumption sites offer a middle way.

In a perfect world, there would be no need for such measures. There
would not be crack addicts shooting up six times a day. Addicts
wouldn't be sharing needles and blood-borne viruses. More than 50% of
them would not, consequently, be infected with Hepatitis C or HIV.
Unfortunately, it is an imperfect world. Police efforts to stifle the
illicit trade have not only failed, but they have failed
extravagantly, eroding respect for the law. With users being chased
into the shadows by police, addiction counsellors are often reduced
to the status of professional hand-wringers. The result is plain to
see: a serious drug problem, one that threatens public health and public order.

The question then is how to deal with the it? Prohibition won't work.
Yet advocating legalization of drugs like crack cocaine or heroin is
a non-starter: the federal government doesn't even have the spine
necessary to pass into law its proposal to decriminalize marijuana.
So, from a practical standpoint, the choice is the status quo, or to
experiment with ideas like consumption sites.

Critics lament the fact that authorities would be enforcing the law
unequally. They see the world as black and white: If you have a law,
you must enforce it rigorously, or not have a law at all. That's nice
in principle but unworkable in practice. The fact is police make
decisions every day that result in unequal enforcement, whether by
offering a gun amnesty or by ignoring lesser crimes to concentrate
resources on more serious crimes. Besides, technically, addicts using
consumption sites are not breaking the law, since they are covered by
an exclusion under the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

There are already 50 such sites around the world, including
Vancouver. There is no evidence that they promote drug use. Indeed,
studies show the result has been to reduce injection drug use in
public, to improve the safe disposal of drug paraphernalia, to reduce
the transmission of deadly diseases (hence to lower public health
costs) and to strengthen the hand of addictions counsellors and
medical practitioners who are on site.

In the end, aren't human lives more important that an abstract principle?