PLAYING ON COMPASSION

The people who speak out the most vociferously in favour of Insite
are addicted, not to the drugs themselves, but to the living they
earn from serving drug addicts or, less concretely but just as
dangerously, to the ecstatic feeling of beneficence that comes from
believing they are helping the downtrodden.

These are the people to whom Insite really matters; not the drug
addicts themselves, but the bureaucrats and politicians who will have
smaller empires if Insite is closed. They are selling Insite to the
public on the basis that harm reduction represents the compassionate
way to deal with addiction. They are the empathy industry.

But the comfort offered by harm reduction is as empty, as fleeting,
and ultimately as destructive as the comfort offered by drugs themselves.

Like most families of drug addicts, our first instinct upon finding
out we had a drug addict in our midst was to engage in harm
reduction. But what we found out, and what most families eventually
find out, is that if we didn't let the addict destroy himself and his
own assets, he would destroy ours. Every family eventually has to cut
itself free from its addict for its own protection.

The addict is going to lose everything to drugs anyway. What is
optional is whether the rest of the family loses everything too.

Addicts on the street in a harm reduction environment will eventually
take the same toll on communities as they did on their families.
Communities, like families, can only give so much.

But the difference between the family with one addict and the
community with a bundle of them is that the community's experience is
mediated through the layer of service providers who form the empathy
industry and its political constituency. Unlike the family and
community, which suffer for every additional concession made to
addicts, the empathy industry grows and expands with each concession.

When the community begins to have the same conversations that
families do -- when talk of reducing damage to the community begins
to supersede talk of reducing harm to the addicts -- the agencies
manipulate public discussion in the opposite direction. They present
information selectively, cloud issues with emotion, keep the lens on
the addicts rather than on the community, divide communities by
keeping issues polarized and vilify opposing proposals, such as closing Insite.

So even if the addicts are doing intolerable harm to the community,
the agencies seek to prevent communities from exercising the option
that so many families have discovered is essential for their own
survival: just saying no.

Besides holding communities hostage to addiction by playing on
compassion, the harm reduction industry claims to save lives, but in
an addict's world that is a complicated concept, especially if the
alternative to death is not recovery but chronic, lifelong addiction
and concomitant mental deterioration. Addicts are driven, for
whatever reason, to flirt with death, to the extent that they try
harder to chase danger the more you try to keep them safe. They do
more drugs and other crazy things if they do not feel close enough to
the edge. Insite may resuscitate people, but chances are those people
would not have overdosed on the street; they can take bigger doses in
Insite because a nurse is there.

Whatever the real story is on addict outcomes, we won't hear it from
the empathy industry because their interests are not aligned with the
interests of the community.

Like families, communities are interested in helping addicts recover,
even if letting them find the will to recover means letting them face
a greater risk of death. Neither families nor communities can
tolerate the burden of sustaining chronic addiction.

The harm reduction industry has the exact opposite objective;
continued chronic addiction is what spins off their bureaucratic,
academic or political careers. They do not benefit from recovery.

Because of this lack of alignment in objectives, we cannot let our
conversations about addiction be controlled by people who benefit
from providing services to chronic addicts. They may understand
addicts, but they don't understand us.

Addicts get really mad at their families when we refuse to give them
money, because they lack the ability to understand any need except
their need for drugs. They have lost their empathy, even for the
people they were once closest to.

And it is empathy for the community that is missing from the current
Insite defense campaign that is being put on by the harm
reductionists. That lack of respect for our right to be separate and
to think differently and to guard our resources to use for our own
purposes rather than for supporting chronic drug addiction is what
reveals adherents of harm reduction as being addicted themselves.
They are willing to sacrifice community well-being for their own.

KPL@telus.net-Karin Litzcke lives in Vancouver.