Vancouver’s Safe Environment for Drug Addicts

Safe injection may save system $14-million

CARLY WEEKS

Globe and Mail November 18, 2008 at 9:38 AM EST

Vancouver’s safe-injection site will save the health-care system at least $14-million and prevent more than 1,000 HIV infections over a 10-year period, according to a new study about the controversial program.

The study, published today in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, is the latest piece of research to suggest the potential social benefit of Insite in helping curb substance abuse, and reducing the spread of hepatitis C, HIV and other infectious diseases. …

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20081118.wldrugs18/BNStory/specialScienceandHealth/home

This is a good start. The “war on drugs” is and has been lost. We need to rethink.

It is possible to be a drug addict and be a fully productive citizen. What is in the way for most addicts is the need to come up with large amounts of money to buy the stuff.

The solution is to decriminalize drug use. And to make clean, cheap drugs available to addicts. That way, they won’t be robbing, sitting in prison, or being otherwise antisocial.

It seems to me that the only benificiary of the present drug policies is the Mafia. They have a monopoly on a product that can be sold at many times the production cost for tremendous profit. They are probably behind the “war on drugs” as presently fought.

There are many other beneficiaries: the government agencies and bureaucracies that depend on the “War” for their jobs and appropriations; the other parts of the enforcement arms — DEA and other Federal, State and local agencies that get much or all of their funding that way; the prison industry. Lots of folks benefit, and it is not to the government’s advantage to do anything substantive at all. Additionally, it’s a way to keep the populace frightened and willing to put up with draconian actions of all sorts, and one more way to keep poor people ineffective politically…and on and on and on.

About the only folks who don’t benefit are the ones that need it most: the addicts themselves. If 1/5th of the money we spend on the “War” were spent efficiently on management, treatment and rehabilitation, we could solve a lot of the problems. But that would involve admitting that the whole thing is a farce. Maybe now that will begin to happen.