BAD PLAN FOR ADDICTS

Anne McLellan has got it exactly backward: her solution to the plague of
heroin on Canada's streets is to make it easier for addicts to shoot up.
The federal health minister, we learned last weekend, has been quietly
preparing a plan to open government-approved "shooting galleries" where
addicts can go to use the drugs they buy. She'll go public soon, and the
first of the sites would be open within a year. Ms. McLellan, like many
other well-intentioned people deeply concerned about the dreadful human
toll of drug addiction, has somehow managed to remain painfully unclear on
the concept.

A real solution to the heroin problem - insofar as one is possible at all -
will not be found in providing "safe injection sites," as the government
jargon calls them. The idea behind these places seems at first glance quite
sensible: minimizing the human damage that comes from shared needles and
other squalid conditions of the addict life, while getting the addicted
into contact with medical and social workers. But by exactly the same logic
the government should also move boldly forward and provide the heroin
itself, for free: after all, why let addicts take a chance with
unpredictable street purity and dangerous "cut" powders when you can
provide "safe injection substance?" And free heroin would also prevent all
the crime which addicts commit to get the money for their drugs.

Well, the problem demands more than sarcasm. And certainly it demands
better than the status quo, which is simply not tolerable: Vancouver is
generally reputed to have Canada's worst heroin crisis (although other
cities may not be many years behind): 23 per cent of intravenous users of
illegal drugs in Vancouver are now HIV-positive, the Vancouver Sun reports.
The police and courts there seem to have given up: trafficking sentences,
when anyone bothers to lay charges, average less than 60 days in jail.
Nobody knows how many addicts there are, in Vancouver or nation-wide, but
even countless too-early deaths don't seem to be reducing the total numbers.

More vigorous law enforcement on the supply side would certainly help, and
we don't understand why the justice system is so relaxed about this
scourge. But on the demand side, the heroin crisis is better understood as
a public-health matter than as a crime wave.

Legalizing shooting galleries is the easy way out. Significantly, the
McLellan Shooting Galleries - as they should be called - involve not one
dollar of federal money. There would, under the minister's plan, be simply
a federal undertaking to look the other way, or perhaps amend the Criminal
Code if necessary. Provinces and municipalities would set up these
facilities and pay the bills.

There is an alternate approach worth trying, we believe. We would like to
see Ms. McLellan support it, and back it with serious federal money. This
approach would cost much more than the McLellan Galleries, and be more
complicated, and take time. It is, simply, greatly expanded social-work
efforts plus more input from both the justice system and public-health
officials, all with the goal of rescuing addicts, one by one, from the trap
they're in. This would demand more social-workers, more halfway houses and
other residential facilities, more housing subsidies, specialized medical
facilities, closer monitoring of individuals, deeper involvement in the
lives of addicts.

Not a panacea, we know. But at least a solution along these general lines
would offer some hope of keeping heroin out of the veins of our vulnerable
neighbours who need help. That's a lot better than a solution designed to
get heroin into these poor people.