INSITE SHOULD BE CLOSED NOW

UNDER the red-herring rubric of "public health practice and a
balanced four-pillar approach to drug policy," Provincial Health
Officer Perry Kendall claims that "methadone maintenance, needle
exchanges and supervised injection sites have proven to reduce the
risk for HIV and to engage vulnerable individuals in health and
social services."

Kendall made this high-ground claim in a letter to the editor of the
National Post published May 30.

The phrase "proven to reduce the risk for HIV and to engage
vulnerable individuals in health and social services" is pure
tricksterism, a cunning deception impregnated with the sperm of misinformation.

Come now Mr. Kendall, when you speak of "vulnerable individuals" you
avoided the plain fact that they are drug addicts whose health is
seriously compromised; that first and foremost they need a practising
physician to determine the state of their health and to insist that
they stop using narcotics and go into detoxification.

Surely you have at least an inkling that dreary methadone, the
decades-old cure-all for heroin addiction, is in fact a treadmill
drug that does not reduce harm and restore an addict to good health;
that needle exchange, touted as an absolute to end transmission of
HIV by injection drug users, has not done so; that abandoned syringes
turning up everywhere prove that clean syringes are not exchanged one
for one, just handed out indiscriminately.

Just a week after Kendall's letter, the National Post published an
opinion of Insite's executive director, Liz Evans. Alongside her
message was a picture of an Insite T-shirt with the words Be Safe,
Inject at Insite. The essence of Evan's message: "What harm reduction
does - it keeps people alive, so that one day, they can enter treatment."

Behind the harm-reduction smokescreen is the need to launder
addiction out of human agency; to remove any possibility that
addiction will be regarded as self-inflicted; and to ennoble the
addict as a victim who must not be demonized or criminalized.

On Nov. 21, 2000, the Vancouver Sun gave a banner headline to then
mayor Philip Owen's grandiose promise that he was going to combat
Vancouver's drug crisis with a sweeping plan labelled "four pillars."
Owen proposed supervised injection sites, originally called "safe"
injection sites, bundled up with free heroin for hard-core users,
testing the strength of heroin and cocaine, and social centres for
addicts. Two years later it was still being formulated and remained
safe rhetoric.

On Nov. 16, 2002, here-today-gone-tomorrow Larry Campbell touched
down for one term in the mayor's chair. He got the job by being an
even louder voice for so-called safe injection sites and he
succeeded. But soon the devil in Ottawa whispered: "Give up the
mental anxiety of the council chamber and take up the title of
senator in our Red Chamber of pomps and vanities." And that was a
chapter in the life of here-today-gone-tomorrow Larry Campbell.

Sam Sullivan, another believer in Owen's grand plan, was elected
mayor in 2006. Approaching mid-term and needing traction, Sullivan
has proposed a pretentious experiment to be conducted in tandem with
Insite. A select cohort of docile addicts will be persuaded to
forsake the instant gratification of high-voltage intravenous
injection of illicit drugs for low-voltage, swallow-and-wait tablets
of pharmaceutical drugs.

To "mainline" is old druggie slang for injecting intravenously, and a
"main line" is a vein, a highway to the brain.

Someone ought to whisper in Sam's ear: "If you swallow a tablet most
of it dissipates, ever so slowly, in your alimentary canal. It is not
connected to your brain. Not much gets into the bloodstream to gong
your brain."

The driving force behind Insite is a registered society of "public
health" physicians, the Health Officers' Council of British Columbia.
The council takes it upon itself to be the supreme arbiter of what is
best for Canada's drug addicts. They dehumanize addicts by reducing
them to the status of mere physiological specimens in the Insite
laboratory process, all the while sheltering them from stigma and
enabling them to defer withdrawal and abstinence. Sullivan's madcap
substitute pill experiment is right up their alley.

Before swallowing the claims of these experts, it would be wise to
sprinkle them with a few grains of salt, or to become even more
skeptical and consider adopting Benjamin Disraeli's admonition that
in the modern world there are lies, damned lies and statistics.

On Dec. 5, 2005 the Vancouver Courier published a report by staff
writer Mike Howell, Insite Staff Urged to Help Addicts Inject.

Howell provided a chilling glimpse into Insite; a sometimes gruesome
scenario of enfeebled addicts unable to inject themselves.

"A call for staff at the city's supervised injection site to help
drug users inject drugs at the facility is under review.

"Dr. Perry Kendall, the province's medical health officer, said the
provincial steering committee that oversees Insite . . . is debating the idea.

"There are liability issues if staff or volunteers did the injecting,
there are probably professional issues if you were asking nurses to
do the injecting of illicit drugs, said Kendall, the chair of the
steering committee."

It seems to me that the main concern of the Health Officers' Council
is with cohorts of drug addicts and how, as a commonality, they are
accommodated by Insite.

Each addict should be individualized and recognized as a human being
hell-bent on self-destruction; a person in dire need of going one on
one with a practising physician - not just enabled to inject an
undetermined substance with the risk of overdosing right on the spot
and being carted off to the emergency ward.

Consider what would happen in any doctor's office.

Addict: "Well, doc, I've just got my hands on some heroin and I'm
having trouble injecting it."

Doctor: "No, you must not inject it, even if it is pharmaceutical
quality heroin. I'm telling you to stop using heroin. It's a poison
that will destroy your health. If I'm going to do anything for you, I
first have to do a thorough examination to find out how much damage
you've already done. And then I'll see if I can get you into detox
and recovery. I'll never help you or anyone else inject street drugs."

Addict: "Don't get so uppity doc, cause I'm outta here and onto the
SkyTrain to Vancouver. Insite will help me crank up, no fuss."

It would be an act of professional negligence and criminal
malpractice for a doctor to assist a patient to inject an illicit drug.

It is obscenely preposterous that our federal government permits
bureaucratic medicine men and their sleight of mind to escape the
same condemnation. Insite should be closed. Now!