TIME FOR A JAB OF REALITY

Legal Shooting Gallery for Junkies Misses the Real Target

Boarded-over windows, out-of-business signs and warnings to tourists
- -- stay away.

This, apparently, is how those in the drug addiction business measure
success: Streets filled with decay, desperation and addiction, where
ordinary citizens fear to tread.

That's the grim reality of Vancouver's downtown Eastside, where just
surviving to poke another needle is a major accomplishment for the
thousands of addicts who rot there.

The bar for success is brutally low -- it's no wonder Canada's first
government-sanctioned shooting gallery is celebrating a medical study
which points to a slight reduction in fatal overdoses.

"Our results suggest that (safe-injection facilities) are an
effective intervention to reduce community overdose mortality in
Canada," addiction researcher and co-author Thomas Kerr wrote.

Published in prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, the
study shows that for two years after Vancouver's Insite clinic opened
in 2003, fatal overdoses fell 35%, from 56 deaths to 33.

You'd sort of hope so, with medical professionals on hand to watch
the junkies as they shoot up, using state-supplied needles and their
own supply of street drugs.

If an addict slumps out of her seat at the $3 million-a-year
facility, a nurse is right there, ready to intervene.

For a dozen or so addicts a year, the clinic has proven a lifesaver.
Unfortunately, their good luck is a drop in the bucket -- and
perspective is where this study fails.

You can't blame The Lancet, because it's not the role of a medical
journal to look beyond the scope of a scientific study, but Vancouver
has a much bigger problem than preventing overdoses.

It has saved a few lives, but what a shooting gallery really
represents is Vancouver's ill-conceived tolerance of a killer drug
epidemic, which grows worse in that city by the year.

In 2004, Insite reported 588 people a day were using the clinic. By
2010, 855 people were visiting each day, the majority shooting up.

Vancouver, rather than fighting back against drug addiction, has
become a city that accepts it -- and the downtown Eastside shows what
acceptance looks like.

No one has properly counted the number of IV addicts living near Main
and East Hastings since 2000, when 4,700 users could be found in an
area about the size of Calgary's Kensington district.

But a 2009 report by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS,
recorded a "ten-fold" increase in Vancouver's use of hard drugs like
crack and crystal meth, with public needle use growing frighteningly common.

If there's a mecca for Canada's addicts, it's Vancouver, where public
tolerance and mild weather have combined as a magnet for those on a
path of self-destruction.

Harm reduction is the mantra of those who believe addicts should be
coddled until they are ready to be cured, with the belief that a
healthy junkie may survive to sober up, eventually.

For those saved from overdosing, maybe -- but shooting galleries and
needle exchanges do little to prevent the real killers, like HIV,
because a clean needle can't erase a lifestyle rife with risky behaviour.

"In Vancouver, British Columbia, an HIV outbreak continued despite a
large-scale, established and well-used Needle Exchange program,"
reads a 2004 report by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Clean needles and shooting galleries do save some, but the only
lasting cure for a severe addiction is to escape the drugs themselves
- -- and to make the addict's lifestyle more comfortable is to help no one.

Street junkies will only escape when, and if, they're ready -- but
Vancouver's strategy is akin to cooking free cheeseburgers for people
suffering from morbid obesity.

If addicts love Vancouver for its easy-to-be-wasted attitude, every
citizen in that city suffers for the tolerance to addiction --
starting with the loss of a vast area of downtown, now a wasteland of wastrels.

Vancouver's harm reduction adherents can celebrate a slight reduction
in overdose deaths, but they need only look at their city's growing
addiction issue to know this is no cure.

You can save an addict's life, but while the drug use continues,
you're only delaying the inevitable.