THE NEEDLE POINT

Me, I'm scared of needles. It's one of those irrational fears, and tends to
keep me away from dentist visits and blood donation clinics. It kept me
from being able to administer insulin to our diabetic cat, and it also kept
me from ever experimenting with heroin back in my rebellious teen years
(phew). And it kept me from picking up the needle I found on the ground a
few months ago, even though that ground happened to be in my backyard, and
the needle had to get gone, quick, before the kids touched it.

But before my husband took it away with a pair of kitchen tongs, I made
sure to show it to my four-year-old, instructing him to "never, ever, ever
touch one of those."

Freelance writer Andrea Scott-Bigsby hoped she'd have that same sort of
educational opportunity (if you can call it that) before her own son ever
came across an abandoned needle. But as she explains on page 8, that didn't
happen, with disturbing results. And as Anh Hoang writes on page 7, there
are more and more needles out there, just waiting to be found.

Seems like everyone's got a needle story this summer. It's not surprising.
Every year, tonnes of heroin--the developed world's injectable
drug-of-choice--dribble into North America a few kilograms at a time, the
end product of an industry that is worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
It comes from countries like Myanmar, Afghanistan, Colombia--places where
there are few laws or organized governments, and plenty of desperate people
who make their meagre livings laboriously scraping the raw material--opium
gum--from the pods of poppies. From there, the mark-up is drastic, and the
costs--human and social--of trafficking add up astronomically. A lot of
people make a lot of money along the way between those poppy fields and the
streets of Victoria--but it's the people at either end of the chain--the
growers and the end users of the refined (and usually, by then,
adulterated) heroin--who suffer. Neither has adequate support or means to
change their situation. And neither can be blamed for depending on each
other, strangers halfway across the world.

The U.S.-led "war on drugs" has cost billions of dollars, and
achieved--what? We can measure its success thus far right here in Victoria,
by looking at the ground and counting the number of used--and potentially
dangerous--syringes on our streets. It's easy to complain about them, and
easy enough, too, to pick them up and dispose of them safely. But that's
not the point.

I'm hoping my own fear of needles will spill over, not just to my kids, but
to our community. In turn, I hope, that fear will demand attention, and
that attention will demand action. What kind of action? Preferably the kind
that happens locally. The kind that comes with lots of money and results,
like government and city initiatives. The kind that helps those who can't
help but toss their used needles into backyards, parks or playgrounds.
Because that's the kind of action that really brings the point home.