CONSIDERING INJECTION SITES

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 got off drugs, or even if they really
tried.

Here's the 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.