IN OUR VIEW: SAFETY FIRST

When it comes to our relationship with the big city to the west, we in the
suburbs like to keep our distance. Oh, we like Vancouver's parks and
cultural opportunities and it's great fun to take the visiting relatives to
Granville Island and for gelato in the West End, but we don't see
Vancouver's problems as our problems.

And that brings us to safe injection sites. Vancouver, Health Canada and
the provincial health ministry have, quite courageously, opened the first
clinic in North America where addicts can inject their drugs with clean
needles in a supervised setting. It is a health issue, proponents say, and
will save lives. Addiction, they say, can't be addressed as a criminal
problem. We've tried that and it doesn't work.

The safe injection site won't supply addicts with drugs, but it will make
counselling available and provide resources for addicts wanting help with
their addiction and other health concerns. Safe injections sites have
worked in Europe and this is, in essence, a pilot project to see if they
will work here.

And any way you look at it, something has to be done. So far this year, 37
people have died in Vancouver of drug overdoses. In the last five years,
that number is 309, with 524 drug users dead from AIDS.

Those people weren't born and raised on the Downtown Eastside. They come
from all over the province. Like it or not, many are products of the
suburbs, including the Tri-Cities. Don't believe it? Talk to a social
worker or a police officer.

No child says he wants to grow up to be a drug addict and live from fix to
fix on the street. We don't know all the reasons it happens, but we do know
some addicts turn their lives around. If the safe injection site can help
keep people alive long enough to make that change, it will have fulfilled
its mandate and more.