POINTLESS TO FIGHT EXCHANGE

Editor, the Times:

From working directly with homeless people for the past several years
around Abbotsford and Mission, both as a volunteer, visiting people in
their tent cities or cardboard boxes and currently as a shelter
worker, I am very familiar with the plight these very vulnerable
members of society face.

Mission has made great strides in helping homeless in our community
such as the Haven in the Hollow Shelter and newly opening Grand Street
Lodge where people can live in independent suites but have access to
trained mental health workers and other support staff.

Abbotsford, however, with a much larger population has made little
progress, a city that is especially known for espousing Christian
values. A pressing issue for municipalities has been the needle
exchange program, used in Europe for decades, and in Vancouver, Surrey
and even Chilliwack for several years, and is one of the fundamental
three pillars in actually reducing drug abuse and its consequences.
Needle exchange also puts addicts in contact with mental health and
addiction workers that increase the chance a person seeks treatment
and gets clean.

What is our greatest fear about this program in Abbotsford? It's
simple, flawed logic: That programs such as the needle exchange
condone drug use and actually will increase its rate. This is farthest
from the truth: most of the people on the street, though having
different individual stories, have faced a similar lack of social
support from family members [who] were abusive or neglectful, living
conditions throughout their life.

Wake up Abbotsford.

Because of the desperate circumstances this segment of the population
is in, people seeking a temporary escape from their misery will
continue to happen.

While we seek to solve the larger problems that have led people to
drug use in the first place why do we add the additional misery of
shared needles massively increasing people's chance of contracting HIV
and Hepatitis?

Are we so naive as to think that by not giving users clean needles
they will stop doing drugs?

But there is another benefit besides lowering disease rates in the
presently addicted population, it is something that benefits us all.

Having a needle exchange program prevents dirty needles from being on
the streets or in our parks and unsuspecting children from stepping on
them. Lowering disease rates in the addicted population also lowers
the chance that frontline workers, such as myself, or doctors, nurses
and mental health workers will contract the same diseases or spend up
to 10 years on painful anti-retroviral drugs to ward off infection
from accidental needle sticks or contaminated clothing, wounds, etc.

While more and more of Abbotsford's church-going population move to
Sumas Mountain and commute to work to their work, they may not see the
poor and the addicted for months to years at a time and so ignorance
becomes bliss - but the problem remains.

Support needle exchange and make Abbotsford a cleaner and healthier
city.

Richard Tatomir,

Abbotsford