WORD GAMES AND DRUG TREATMENT CENTRES

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.

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.