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The federal health minister, we learned last weekend, has been quietly preparing a plan to open government-approved "shooting galleries" where addicts can go to use the drugs they buy. She'll go public soon, and the first of the sites would be open within a year. Ms. McLellan, like many other well-intentioned people deeply concerned about the dreadful human toll of drug addiction, has somehow managed to remain painfully unclear on the concept.
A real solution to the heroin problem - insofar as one is possible at all - will not be found in providing "safe injection sites," as the government jargon calls them. The idea behind these places seems at first glance quite sensible: minimizing the human damage that comes from shared needles and other squalid conditions of the addict life, while getting the addicted into contact with medical and social workers. But by exactly the same logic the government should also move boldly forward and provide the heroin itself, for free: after all, why let addicts take a chance with unpredictable street purity and dangerous "cut" powders when you can provide "safe injection substance?" And free heroin would also prevent all the crime which addicts commit to get the money for their drugs.
Well, the problem demands more than sarcasm. And certainly it demands better than the status quo, which is simply not tolerable: Vancouver is generally reputed to have Canada's worst heroin crisis (although other cities may not be many years behind): 23 per cent of intravenous users of illegal drugs in Vancouver are now HIV-positive, the Vancouver Sun reports. The police and courts there seem to have given up: trafficking sentences, when anyone bothers to lay charges, average less than 60 days in jail. Nobody knows how many addicts there are, in Vancouver or nation-wide, but even countless too-early deaths don't seem to be reducing the total numbers.
More vigorous law enforcement on the supply side would certainly help, and we don't understand why the justice system is so relaxed about this scourge. But on the demand side, the heroin crisis is better understood as a public-health matter than as a crime wave.
Legalizing shooting galleries is the easy way out. Significantly, the McLellan Shooting Galleries - as they should be called - involve not one dollar of federal money. There would, under the minister's plan, be simply a federal undertaking to look the other way, or perhaps amend the Criminal Code if necessary. Provinces and municipalities would set up these facilities and pay the bills.
There is an alternate approach worth trying, we believe. We would like to see Ms. McLellan support it, and back it with serious federal money. This approach would cost much more than the McLellan Galleries, and be more complicated, and take time. It is, simply, greatly expanded social-work efforts plus more input from both the justice system and public-health officials, all with the goal of rescuing addicts, one by one, from the trap they're in. This would demand more social-workers, more halfway houses and other residential facilities, more housing subsidies, specialized medical facilities, closer monitoring of individuals, deeper involvement in the lives of addicts.
Not a panacea, we know. But at least a solution along these general lines would offer some hope of keeping heroin out of the veins of our vulnerable neighbours who need help. That's a lot better than a solution designed to get heroin into these poor people.
Pubdate: Nov.12, 2002
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A real solution to the heroin problem - insofar as one is possible at all - will not be found in providing "safe injection sites," as the government jargon calls them. The idea behind these places seems at first glance quite sensible: minimizing the human damage that comes from shared needles and other squalid conditions of the addict life, while getting the addicted into contact with medical and social workers. But by exactly the same logic the government should also move boldly forward and provide the heroin itself, for free: after all, why let addicts take a chance with unpredictable street purity and dangerous "cut" powders when you can provide "safe injection substance?" And free heroin would also prevent all the crime which addicts commit to get the money for their drugs.
Well, the problem demands more than sarcasm. And certainly it demands better than the status quo, which is simply not tolerable: Vancouver is generally reputed to have Canada's worst heroin crisis (although other cities may not be many years behind): 23 per cent of intravenous users of illegal drugs in Vancouver are now HIV-positive, the Vancouver Sun reports. The police and courts there seem to have given up: trafficking sentences, when anyone bothers to lay charges, average less than 60 days in jail. Nobody knows how many addicts there are, in Vancouver or nation-wide, but even countless too-early deaths don't seem to be reducing the total numbers.
More vigorous law enforcement on the supply side would certainly help, and we don't understand why the justice system is so relaxed about this scourge. But on the demand side, the heroin crisis is better understood as a public-health matter than as a crime wave.
Legalizing shooting galleries is the easy way out. Significantly, the McLellan Shooting Galleries - as they should be called - involve not one dollar of federal money. There would, under the minister's plan, be simply a federal undertaking to look the other way, or perhaps amend the Criminal Code if necessary. Provinces and municipalities would set up these facilities and pay the bills.
There is an alternate approach worth trying, we believe. We would like to see Ms. McLellan support it, and back it with serious federal money. This approach would cost much more than the McLellan Galleries, and be more complicated, and take time. It is, simply, greatly expanded social-work efforts plus more input from both the justice system and public-health officials, all with the goal of rescuing addicts, one by one, from the trap they're in. This would demand more social-workers, more halfway houses and other residential facilities, more housing subsidies, specialized medical facilities, closer monitoring of individuals, deeper involvement in the lives of addicts.
Not a panacea, we know. But at least a solution along these general lines would offer some hope of keeping heroin out of the veins of our vulnerable neighbours who need help. That's a lot better than a solution designed to get heroin into these poor people.
Pubdate: Nov.12, 2002
News Link
