CANADA'S LATEST APPROACH TO DRUGS MUST BE AVOIDED

Have our neighbors to the north completely given up on the war against
drugs?

It appears so. We were horrified this past week to hear Canada will open
North America's first legal safe-injection site for drug addicts later this
year. Canada already has irritated U.S. security officials with a proposal
to decriminalize possession of small amounts of marijuana.

The so-called "shooting gallery" will be federally funded, a 12-seat
facility where addicts will be given the equipment they need to inject
safely under the supervision of nurses. It will open in September in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, an impoverished neighborhood known for crime
and drug use. The site will be exempt from federal drug laws to allow heroin
and cocaine users to use it without fear of arrest.

Similar safe-injection programs have been set up in the Netherlands,
Switzerland, Australia and Germany. While the sites are credited with
reducing overdose deaths and the spread of disease, specialists say the
effect on addiction rates is unclear.

Naturally, U. S. officials are concerned with the effect of an expected
increase in drug activity coming from Canada. That's the immediate impact
Americans will feel when Canada starts giving out needles. But the United
States just doesn't believe that Canada's new approach to drugs is a wise
move, saying the program is neither compassionate nor effective

White House drug czar John Walters said, "Drug abuse is a deadly disease.
It's immoral to allow people to suffer and die from a disease we know how to
treat. The Canadian effort is a lie because there are no safe injection
sites."

We couldn't agree more. We, too, are often frustrated at how our own war on
drugs often seems to be a failure. It sometimes appears that few, if any,
inroads to stemming the tide of drug use have been made.

However, it appears to us that Canada has simply thrown its hands up and
given up. We can never allow this to happen in our country even though there
are like kind of wolves on the prowl here as there are in Canada.

We may not be able to reach every addict, but to make the addicts' pain
legal with open "abuse" centers is a larger crime than we can allow our
minds to deal with.

Canada's current idea of a drug program shows an appalling indifference to
addiction and should be viewed as state-sponsored suicide.