Pubdate: Wed, 29 May 2002
Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2002 Vancouver Courier
Contact:  http://www.vancourier.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474
Author: Kevin Potvin
Note: Kevin Potvin writes for the Republic of East Vancouver newspaper.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange)

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.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager