BRING BACK THE FREE CRACK PIPES

When you hear that your government is helping addicts shoot up or
smoke crack, it's normal to wonder: how can this possibly be good?

I had the same response when I learned of Insite, Vancouver's
governmentfunded supervised injection site. Insite describes itself
as a safe, health-focused place where people inject drugs and connect
to health-care services."

The health services bit is fine, but shooting up? With the direct aid
of government? That just seems wrong. A lot of people think so,
including the Harper Conservatives, who are bent on shutting the place down.

Until recently, Alberta Health Services did similar work,
distributing free, clean crack pipes to Calgary addicts through the
Safeworks Harm Reduction Program. But when local media publicized the
existence of the pipe arrangement last month, things went sideways.
Outraged commentators called on the province to stop enabling
druggies. Do the right thing and shut 'er down, they said. With
remarkable swiftness, the province did just that, citing legal
concerns over the arrangement (pipes are supposedly legally risky to
distribute, while needles are OK).

Despite appearances, however, this is no moral victory. Although the
crack pipe program and Insite might seem wildly misguided, harm
reduction programs have been proven to reduce the risk of deadly
infections. This is why many health organizations, including the
World Health Organization, advocate for harm reduction. Smoking with
a clean crack pipe is better than using broken glass stained with
somebody else's blood.

It makes crude financial sense, too. Better to spend pocket change on
disease prevention rather than tens of thousands treating HIV.

I didn't fully grasp the concept of harm reduction until I read an
essay by Meera Bai, a University of Calgary nursing grad who worked
at Insite. She described how Insite has prevented deaths and helped
addicts get into treatment. Numerous studies have shown this is so,
and this alone should justify its existence. But the real eye-opener
was the atmosphere she described, a place of care and compassion, a
haven where wounds are dressed and feet are washed.

Constant humiliation makes the people I work with especially
vulnerable, and vulnerable in almost every way: to violence, to
exploitation, to false hope and finally to despair," she wrote. "When
allowed into these dark places, it is my privilege, and that of all
Insite staff, to communicate worth and love instead of judgment and
scorn." Conservative MP Joy Smith has reportedly said of Insite's
work: "There's no way that I can support that as a human being."
After reading Bai's words, it's easy to see that Smith and the rest
of her party have got it backwards. As a human being, how can anybody
not support Insite?

This is what the Harper government is trying to end on Vancouver's
downtown eastside. And this is the kind of care that some desperate
people in Calgary will now lose.

There may be a legitimate reason for scrapping the crack pipe
program. If it isn't preventing diseases, isn't saving lives, isn't
of any real benefit to the people that are using it, then by all
means, present the evidence and scratch the program. But Alberta
Health Services hasn't indicated that any of this is the case. It
looks like the province simply caved under media pressure. Certain
voices yelled BAD! BAD! BAD!" over and over again, and eventually,
AHS dutifully changed course.

This will placate those who believe addicts are the sole authors of
their own misery, less than human, unworthy of even a cheap glass
pipe worth less than a couple quarters. But the province should be
looking elsewhere for guidance, basing decisions on sound policy
rather than listening to whoever yells the loudest.

Smoking crack is destructive. That's a given. And taking away a small
program that offers some measure of protection to vulnerable people
on our city's streets? That's destructive too, even though it's less obvious.