UNSAFE INJECTION

The hypocritical, misleading political debate currently 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." That's the euphemism used to describe
government-supplied needles, crack pipes and eventually drugs themselves.
It appears that if Vancouver is going to continue with its doomed
experiment in pandering to addicts, it wants 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 them back. (This is the same
Vancouver-speak that promotes prostitution as a viable career option known
as "sex-trade worker".)

There are plenty of sensible, regular people in Vancouver and elsewhere who
don't believe any of this Orwellian doublespeak. They know that 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 when there are shortages of
real health care services. They believe that making it easier to keep being
a junkie is going to keep more people addicted for longer, and they are right.

Now if only a leader had the courage to say it.