INJECTION SITES NOT ALL THEY'RE CRACKED UP TO BE

Victoria is the second city in B.C. to get in line for the brave new
world of "safe injection sites," as they are persistently referred to
in the mainstream media.

If it goes ahead, our quaint old capital will also be the second city
in Canada to embrace this trendy European strategy. Or North America
for that matter, since so far only Vancouver has taken the plunge.
Once this questionable bit of social engineering spreads to two
cities, look for it to pop up in other B.C. communities that have a
significant hard drug problem, which is to say most of them.

They're already talking about it in Kamloops. =A8The idea of inviting
junkies off the street to a nurse-supervised clinical environment was
nurtured for years in the hothouse of Vancouver city politics, where
the last election was decided mainly on urgent demands to "do
something" about the horror show of dealers and dopers haunting the
streets of Vancouver. Like many debates in our largest city, this one
develops in a fog of euphemisms and jargon that are calculated to
avoid the tough questions. The term "safe injection site" isn't
just a euphemism. It's an outright lie. You'll notice that doctors and
senior bureaucrats say "supervised injection site." They're not
foolish enough to call these places safe.

The heroin or cocaine that is used there is bought from the same
street dealers who have always provided it, and there are no efforts
to test its potency, its purity or for that matter its drain cleaner
or mouse poison content.

The Orwellian language continues to evolve as Victoria city officials
try to stick-handle this issue through a series of neighbourhood
meetings. They're "safe consumption facilities" and "contact points"
and they're certainly not planned for this neighbourhood. This was
just a convenient place to hold a public meeting, really. My first
question was, why Victoria? The place has its share of drug problems,
no doubt, but it hardly swarms with nodded-out junkies and its
car-theft rate is seldom in the headlines.

Heck, even the panhandlers are cleaner and more polite than most
places I've seen. Why not Surrey, or New Westminster, or Burnaby, or
Prince George, where street prostitution and urban crime are more
prevalent? Well, the city and the Vancouver Island Health Authority got a
$50,000 grant from Health Canada so now they've got to spend it.

Victoria Mayor Alan Lowe recently left his city's teeming slums to
take the obligatory fact-finding tour of Bern, Switzerland and the
red-light district of Frankfurt, where he was impressed by the array
of medical, social work and housing support for addicts. The European
tour confirmed that local residents have noticed less drug activity on
the streets, where public parks had been taken over by free-for-all
drug dealing and shooting up, a Massive expenditure of public funds
creates a superficial perception of cleaner streets that pays off at
the polls. That's great if you're a politician. It's not so good if
you're a junkie. MP Randy White, a long-time critic of injection
sites, pointed out last year that overdose deaths actually went up
after InSite opened in Vancouver. Billy Weselowski, who runs
abstinence-based treatment programs in the Lower Mainland, said he
hadn't received a single referral from InSite. =A8InSite officials now
say that between March and August of 2004, they made 262 referrals to
addiction counseling and 78 to detox programs.

Here's the big problem with shoot-up sites, and giving away heroin for
that matter. This approach doesn't help people get off drugs. It helps
them keep using.

Free heroin unpopular? The NAOMI project, another brave federal
experiment, is having a heck of a time giving away free heroin in
Vancouver's downtown eastside. A companion to the trendy injection
site, this pilot program prescribes heroin to long-term addicts who
are willing to submit to its extensive regulations. But it seems these
folks aren't too keen to become wards of the state. They prefer to
take their chances with the dealers on the street.

Watch out for "safe injection site" to morph into "safe consumption
site." This is a euphemism for a crack-smoking room. Politically
correct society can't tolerate a whiff of cigarette smoke, but can
somehow justify second-hand crack smoke. The push for these continues.

The B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV-AIDS has done a survey that
finds 28 per cent of drug users who smoke crack or heroin are willing
to use a "supervised smoking facility." The survey talked to 443 hard
drug smokers, and found that willingness to use a smoking room was up
to 42 per cent among female prostitutes who smoke crack or heroin.
While it's possible to pass on infections from sharing a crack pipe,
I'll venture a layman's opinion that this isn't the biggest Hep C and
HIV hazard faced by these women. A crack-smoking room will keep the
rain off them, but that's about it.