INJECTING ILLEGAL DRUGS IS FAR FROM SAFE

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.

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.