INJECTION SITES ARE 'HARM EXTENSION'

Supervised injection sites will do nothing to ease the Lower
Mainland's drug abuse problems and will only entrench the addict
lifestyle, says an MP who has toured such facilities in Europe.

Alliance MP Randy White is head of the Commons committee on drug
abuse, a multi-party group that includes Liberal MP Hedy Fry and NDP
MP Libby Davies, and which is due to report its findings on Dec. 9. In
an interview, White said he can't disclose the specifics of the report
in advance, but he said there will be controversy generated by the
fine details.

"There are 19 recommendations which are pretty good to my way of
thinking, there are 10 related to 'harm reduction' and there are four
or five regarding marijuana, which is not a big issue," said White.
White said he is troubled by the imminent prospects of the 'harm
reduction' experiments which he believes the federal government will
implement with "three heroin maintenance centres, as pilot projects in
Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver."

Vancouver city council has pledged to initiate "safe injection sites"
in the Downtown East Side within a month. "I label them harm
extension," said White. "Vancouver council has been sold a bill of
goods, they are making a dreadful mistake, and the federal Liberals
are about to buy into it."

In June, White travelled to Europe to visit the 'harm reduction' sites
in the three countries which have adopted the program: Germany,
Holland and Switzerland. He said he learned "three significant things.
One, it creates a major social magnet from other countries, because
addicts will come here. Two, it is not eliminating the drug problem;
they're not getting off drugs because their addictions are being
maintained. Three, the human carnage around these sites is
unbelievable."

"Frankfurt was the most disgusting I've seen," said White. "The centre
wasn't clean; there was blood and dirt on the floor.

"They use weasel words. 'Low threshold' treatment means that people
walk in and nobody asks anything. They just give them a needle and put
them in this room with a table along three sides. There's mirrors so
they can find their veins and shoot up. Then they take them to a
waiting room and if they sit there too long they escort them to the
street, where they can do their crime and get another hit from a
dealer, then it's back into the centre. Unless they walk too far, and
then they just shoot up there and then."

White says the real agenda is heroin legalization.

"My favourite quote was from a German prosecutor, who said 'the way to
legalization goes one pilot project at a time, not all at once'."