BLEEDING HEARTS HAVE IT ALL WRONG

Associate Professor David Dixon and Dr Lisa Maher speak of the value
of providing basic heroin users with clean needles and syringes
(Letters, December 13). But this approach to the basic problem of
heroin addiction could very well be a tragic case of
short-sightedness. For example, how much of the steady increase in
deaths, as well as in use, is due to the policy of handing out free
equipment?

The prospect of free equipment must be acting as an incentive to use
(it's certainly no deterrent). The health-care profession must, then,
look beyond its good intentions and to itself and its revolving-door
policy for possibly increasing use and therefore deaths.

As to the revolving-door policy of needle exchange, what a misnomer.
Users, at a minimum, should have to return used equipment to get an
exchange. If strictly enforced, we then wouldn't have so many needles
discarded into the environment, sticking people in the feet on beaches
and in sand pits, and lying around in alleys like mordant reminders of
our failure to get to grips with this matter.

What's required in this whole thing is less leniency and more
firmness. And that means if they don't enter a rehab program, they
don't get government support. Full stop, of another kind than OD.

Yes, the approach needs to be part of a package, which should include
treatment for the nutritional/biochemical causes of addiction in the
first place. But enough of mollycoddling. It's time for serious love,
not bleeding hearts.

Stan Stanfield,
Palm Beach