SAFE INJECTION SITES SIMPLY HELP USERS KEEP USING

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.

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.

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. Why not Surrey, or New
Westminster, or Burnaby, or Prince George, where street prostitution and
urban crime are more prevalent?

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.