A SOLUTION FOR THE LOWER MAINLAND

With North America's first safe injection site opening on Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside this week it was curious to see even the projects proponents cheering
the project for some seemingly very different reasons.

Former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen seemed primarily interested in managing a
problem of epidemic proportions that cannot be policed nor ignored. His stance
involves finding a middle ground between liberalization and incarceration.

But many others spoke of the health risks and number of deaths that the site
will reportedly prevent. For them the greatest benefit of the safe injection
site reduction in the spread of diseases such as Hep C and HIV and reducing the
number of overdose deaths. And surely if the site delivers in these areas it
must, in part, be considered a success - supplying clean needles to addicts is
a tactic that surely pays dividends .

But the opening of such a site may cause as many problems as it cures - the
ambiguity created for law enforcement officials primary among them.

The problem of creating a haven for those who would break the law as a
lifestyle has the potential to cause no end of difficulties for police and
courts. To this end, one positive about the Vancouver site is that it will
reportedly have no inherent "bubble zone" - a grey area surrounding the
facility in which the law is not enforceable.

It is for these type of problems that we suggest that a safe injection site is
not an answer for Prince George at this time. Unlike the Lower East Side we are
not a mecca for the street-drug lifestyle, nor do we see the epidemics of
transmitted disease levels of Vancouver.

In Prince George a safe injection site would be more likely to handcuff police
and encourage people to head even further down the wrong path as society's
perception of the problem and its addicts is liberalized. The safe injection
site and the philosophy that goes with it does little to address the an
underlying problem with addiction that is so visible on Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside -a conscious decision, or a series of them, somewhere along the line,
to flout the law and society's mores.