THE HYPOCRISY OF INSITE'S SUPPORT

Let me tell you how I spent most of the last week.

Usually, I receive between 50 and 100 e-mails from any of you per
week. I answer them all myself, no formula retort, no anemic efforts
at a perfunctory response. The vast majority of my readers
(approximately 95 per cent) are supportive, lucid and cogent in their
comments. But no issue I have ever addressed for you, including
abortion, the death penalty, immigration or even the gross
commercialization of Valentine's Day, has ever garnered such
malicious responses.

In the seven days since I wrote that Insite was a bust without the
three other pillars (prevention, enforcement and particularly
treatment), I have received seven pieces of negative mail and one
long rambling letter from someone who was clearly a first time user,
but found a pen in the lane: The vitriol was shrill, and,
predictably, incomprehensible. There were those who were kind and
stayed to their point: Two. Total number of e-mails/letters/feedback: 194.

That means 187 responses agreeing that Insite, in its current form,
is of no real measurable value, tax dollars shouldn't be used on
addicts as guinea pigs and Health Minister Tony Clement understands
this and he and the Conservative government of this country are
willing to posit that real compassion is treatment.

Expediently unaddressed by the objectors to my thesis, were questions
as to why Onsite, a "pre-tox" facility, is housed 15 feet away from
where addicts shoot up at Insite (a trigger). Or why in the over half
a decade since Insite has been open, not one of the dozen or so harm
reduction disciples have lobbied for treatment centres, never mind
just extra beds (and this they discovered only recently).

Not a letter to any government by any of them asking for more police,
not one call for additional programs in schools. Nothing.

Instead, Mark Townsend of the Portland Hotel Society, landlords of
Insite, took to the airwaves on the Bill Good Show this week, and
gave a virtuoso performance: Insite is essentially the greatest
construct since sliced bread and critics are political hacks and
uninformed. He never addressed the top addiction-ologists in this
province being against the current form of Insite and never talked
about how it takes you no less than two weeks just to get into a
detox bed in Vancouver. Instead, he filled Bill the Good's studio,
with, as my Jewish friends say, schlock. This is the same Mark
Townsend who recently called the office of one of the top addiction
specialists in B.C. and dropped F-bombs and spewed unearthly venom,
because the good doctor was highly critical of the harm reductionists
in an interview with the Globe and Mail.

I am not against a facility that promotes the better health and, in
fact, the cure (for lack of a better word) of an addict. I am simply
against the one-pillar approach. If the other three pillars had been
operating from the outset, there would be no need for a debate now.
The Tories wouldn't have any gripe with the current waste of time and
money at Insite, and at least 187 of you would be as silent on this
issue as I would, because treatment works better than any other harm
reduction model. In fact, Minister Clement himself has named
treatment as being key.

He also mentioned in a majority of countries where harm reduction was
attempted, they have reverted to forced treatment and jailing dealers
- for a long time. Again, this is nothing you will hear from the
local proponents of Insite, because, to steal a phrase, it's an
'inconvenient truth.'

Frankly, what this issue brings to light, more so, is the alarming,
ferocious hypocrisy of the intemperate harm reduction lobby.

Nothing else.