VICTORIA DOESN'T NEED A SAFE INJECTION SITE

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.

The 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.

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.

InSite officials now say that between March and August of 2004, they
made 262 referrals to addiction counseling and 78 to detox programs.
But they don't know how many people actually got off drugs, or even if
they really tried.

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.

Word watch

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.

Crack rooms backed

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.

This group of women, not surprisingly, has been identified as at
highest risk for contracting Hepatitis C and HIV. 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.

Drug tourism

Amsterdam has the Cannabis Cup. One Vancouver tour bus operator
already has the InSite project in the downtown eastside as a regular
sightseeing stop.