SHOOTING GALLERIES' MAKE ECONOMIC SENSE

The most progressive act the City of Vancouver can do today is open up
"shooting galleries"-places where hard drug users can acquire and use hard
drugs for free. The arguments in favour of shooting galleries are
overwhelming, while the arguments opposed to them are weak.

The strongest argument against shooting galleries supposes that, when you
have doctors handing out drugs on the public's tab, you encourage illicit
drug use. This argument suggests that shooting galleries involve the
various levels of government in the immoral destruction of lives, and that
even more people than are already addicted will go down that wrong road.

The argument doesn't hold up under scrutiny, however. More than a century
ago, a German sociologist, Emile Durkheim, wrote what remains today a
seminal work called Suicide. In this book, Durkheim pointed out that while
each individual case of suicide has its own personal reasons, the sum of
all personal reasons does not add up to an explanation for the consistent
suicide rate. To understand an individual suicide, individual reasons
suffice, but to understand societal rates of suicide, societal reasons must
be sought.

The same is true of illicit drug addictions. Each addict has individual
reasons for being in the state he or she is in. But the sum of all
individual reasons for illicit drug addictions does not explain the
consistent rate of drug addiction throughout our society, and addressing
those individual reasons will do nothing to affect that overall rate. Offer
counseling and treatment to as many addicts as you wish, and you still
won't see a decline in the rate of drug addiction. That's because the rate
of addiction is caused by societal reasons.

Those societal reasons are a matter of complex debate. For starters, there
is the economic requirement in a capitalist society to maintain a sizable
army of destitute unemployed workers, and it is state policy the world over
to intervene in the economy if the rate of unemployment drops below about
five per cent.

Someone has to play the role of desperate loser to keep wages from
skyrocketing, and dealing with that role is psychologically difficult
without occasional escapes. One handy escape is achieved with hard drugs,
which unfortunately are addictive. So as long as we intend to maintain a
capitalist economy, a certain number of people will be addicted to drugs.

We aren't likely, any time soon, to shift away from capitalism. It
therefore stands to reason that we have, as a society, made a (perhaps
unconscious) decision to accept that a certain portion of our fellow
citizens will self-destruct with heavy and addictive drugs, and we are not
prepared to do what it takes to reduce that rate. Indeed, it may be beyond
our abilities to reduce the rate even if we did resolve to attack it.

Accepting this fact does not mean we condone illicit drug use. Just as we
have no ability to reduce the rate of drug addiction, we are also powerless
to increase it. The rate of heavy drug addiction is a result of deeply
embedded social and cultural norms; even the act of raining packets of free
drugs over a city from the belly of an airplane would do nothing to alter it.

While the rate of drug addiction might be impervious to any interventions,
problems surrounding drugs can be directly affected. Rates of crime related
to drug addictions, for example, are not so unmovable. The calculations are
simple. If a drug addict requires $100 a day to support his or her habit,
the addicted person must produce the necessary cash. A significant
proportion of drug addicts hold jobs and own cars and manage to come up
with the requisite cost of supply without resorting to crime. Drug
addiction itself does not necessarily spell a criminal life-aside from the
wholly anachronistic fact of the illegality of the drugs in the first place.

If an addict does not generate sufficient legitimate income, however, then
crime is the only option. If the cost of supply for the addiction were
reduced, or erased altogether, no addicts would need to get cash illegally
to support their addiction.

As a society, the calculations are simple. We only need to add up all the
costs of policing, courts, jails, alarms, window bars, insurance, and so
on, and compare that to what it would take to locate a few shooting
galleries around the city and staff them with a doctor and a couple of nurses.

We happily install traffic lights to keep car drivers from smashing
themselves up. Shooting galleries for addicts are no different.