EDITORIAL: NOT WORTHY

The hypocritical, misleading political debate going on over so-called
"safe injection sites" is just an election issue in Vancouver, right?

Wrong.

Vancouver mayoral candidate Jennifer Clarke has made it clear that, as
soon as she gets elected, she plans to press B.C. Health Minister
Colin Hansen for legislation to keep other communities from opting out
of the disastrous trend towards "harm reduction".

This is the euphemism used to describe government-supplied needles,
crack pipes, condoms and eventually drugs themselves.

Clarke and others seem convinced if Vancouver is going to continue
with its doomed experiment in pandering to addicts, they want to be
sure and take other communities down into junkie hell along with it.

In Vancouver-speak, "harm reduction" is one of the "four pillars" of
an enlightened drug policy, along with treatment nobody wants to fund
and enforcement that produces arrests but little-if-any punishment.

Similarly, "needle exchange" is Vancouver-speak for an unregulated
operation that hands out thousands of needles and rarely gets any
back. (This is the same Vancouver-speak that promotes prostitution as
a viable career known as "sex-trade worker".)

There are plenty of ordinary, sensible people in Vancouver and
elsewhere who don't believe any of this Orwellian doublespeak. They
know there is no such thing as a "safe injection site" when what is
being injected is heroin or cocaine or whatever street dealers are
passing off as such on a given day.

They don't want their tax dollars going to nice, comfortable
nurse-supervised places for addicts to shoot up, especially when there
are shortages of real health care services.

They believe making it easier to keep being a junkie is going to keep
more people addicted for longer, and they are right.

Now if a politician--any politician--only had the courage to say
it.