NO PROOF THAT HARM REDUCTION IS CURING OUR DRUG ILLS

Editor, The News:

I am grateful for our city's stand on harm reduction. Thank you, Mayor Mary
Reeves and council, for looking at the bigger picture and doing what is
best for those who are addicted and for our community.

It is difficult to understand the logic of UCFV's social work director and
letter writer Gloria Wolfson ('Abstinence works, but so does harm
reduction,' April 16) that just because a government mandates a policy, the
taxpayer should accept it.

It is particularly baffling at a time when our governments are laden with
scandals and boondoggles.

Harm reduction may be the quickest and easiest measure to take, but it does
not address the problem.

Band-aid social programs create jobs, but they also tend to be far more
expensive than what we are first led to believe - and far less effective.

Harm reduction is particularly expensive because it robs funding from
detox, treatment, education, drug courts and law enforcement, funding that
not only serves as cures but also prevention.

Is that not better use of our tax dollars? Is it not more compassionate?

Vancouver's NAOMI project (free heroin) is supposed to particularly address
the petty crime problem that is rampant in Vancouver.

(The rate of car break-ins is among the highest in North America).

According to a recent report from the Canadian Association of Police
Boards, NAOMI will cost approximately $6.4 million and serve 158 addicts,
which is a cost of well over $40,000 per person.

All this, weighing heavily on the slender hope that the users themselves
will "make positive changes in their lives."

Compare that with the Toronto drug court, which will cost $8,000 per
person, with 85 per cent of these people not returning to crime. With
limited dollars available to treat addicts, which one would a community
obviously support?

The Vancouver Pilot Project for Safe Injection reported recently at the
International Downtown Association conference that they had no overdoses in
their clinic.

But they neglected to mention that the overdose rate had actually increased
in the downtown eastside.

They also stated they have between 500 and 800 injections a day. But with
an addict needing to inject five to 10 times a day, they are servicing only
between 50 and 100 people out of approximately 5,000 users.

This is less than five per cent with a $4 million dollar test project.

They also cannot assure us that when an addict uses the facility
occasionally, they are not still injecting unsafely elsewhere. There is no
proof that HIV has been reduced in the drug population due to a needle
exchange project or safe injection site; in fact, the incidence has increased.

Thankfully, our city gatekeepers have looked beyond our federal and
provincial government programs, have done their homework and have
considered what will best serve all of us in the long term.

M. R. Heinrichs,
Abbotsford