SAFE INJECTION SITES DON'T STOP PEOPLE FROM USING DEADLY DRUG

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 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. 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 stickhandle 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. 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 support for addicts. The European tour confirmed local residents
have noticed less drug activity on the streets, where parks had been taken
over by 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.