Pubdate: Sun, 24 Apr 2011
Source: Calgary Sun, The (CN AB)
Copyright: 2011 The Calgary Sun
Contact:  http://www.calgarysun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/67
Author: Michael Platt, Calgary Sun
Cited: British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS 
http://www.cfenet.ubc.ca
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Downtown+Eastside
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites)

TIME FOR A JAB OF REALITY

Legal Shooting Gallery for Junkies Misses the Real Target

Boarded-over windows, out-of-business signs and warnings to tourists 
- -- stay away.

This, apparently, is how those in the drug addiction business measure 
success: Streets filled with decay, desperation and addiction, where 
ordinary citizens fear to tread.

That's the grim reality of Vancouver's downtown Eastside, where just 
surviving to poke another needle is a major accomplishment for the 
thousands of addicts who rot there.

The bar for success is brutally low -- it's no wonder Canada's first 
government-sanctioned shooting gallery is celebrating a medical study 
which points to a slight reduction in fatal overdoses.

"Our results suggest that (safe-injection facilities) are an 
effective intervention to reduce community overdose mortality in 
Canada," addiction researcher and co-author Thomas Kerr wrote.

Published in prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, the 
study shows that for two years after Vancouver's Insite clinic opened 
in 2003, fatal overdoses fell 35%, from 56 deaths to 33.

You'd sort of hope so, with medical professionals on hand to watch 
the junkies as they shoot up, using state-supplied needles and their 
own supply of street drugs.

If an addict slumps out of her seat at the $3 million-a-year 
facility, a nurse is right there, ready to intervene.

For a dozen or so addicts a year, the clinic has proven a lifesaver. 
Unfortunately, their good luck is a drop in the bucket -- and 
perspective is where this study fails.

You can't blame The Lancet, because it's not the role of a medical 
journal to look beyond the scope of a scientific study, but Vancouver 
has a much bigger problem than preventing overdoses.

It has saved a few lives, but what a shooting gallery really 
represents is Vancouver's ill-conceived tolerance of a killer drug 
epidemic, which grows worse in that city by the year.

In 2004, Insite reported 588 people a day were using the clinic. By 
2010, 855 people were visiting each day, the majority shooting up.

Vancouver, rather than fighting back against drug addiction, has 
become a city that accepts it -- and the downtown Eastside shows what 
acceptance looks like.

No one has properly counted the number of IV addicts living near Main 
and East Hastings since 2000, when 4,700 users could be found in an 
area about the size of Calgary's Kensington district.

But a 2009 report by the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, 
recorded a "ten-fold" increase in Vancouver's use of hard drugs like 
crack and crystal meth, with public needle use growing frighteningly common.

If there's a mecca for Canada's addicts, it's Vancouver, where public 
tolerance and mild weather have combined as a magnet for those on a 
path of self-destruction.

Harm reduction is the mantra of those who believe addicts should be 
coddled until they are ready to be cured, with the belief that a 
healthy junkie may survive to sober up, eventually.

For those saved from overdosing, maybe -- but shooting galleries and 
needle exchanges do little to prevent the real killers, like HIV, 
because a clean needle can't erase a lifestyle rife with risky behaviour.

"In Vancouver, British Columbia, an HIV outbreak continued despite a 
large-scale, established and well-used Needle Exchange program," 
reads a 2004 report by the Public Health Agency of Canada.

Clean needles and shooting galleries do save some, but the only 
lasting cure for a severe addiction is to escape the drugs themselves 
- -- and to make the addict's lifestyle more comfortable is to help no one.

Street junkies will only escape when, and if, they're ready -- but 
Vancouver's strategy is akin to cooking free cheeseburgers for people 
suffering from morbid obesity.

If addicts love Vancouver for its easy-to-be-wasted attitude, every 
citizen in that city suffers for the tolerance to addiction -- 
starting with the loss of a vast area of downtown, now a wasteland of wastrels.

Vancouver's harm reduction adherents can celebrate a slight reduction 
in overdose deaths, but they need only look at their city's growing 
addiction issue to know this is no cure.

You can save an addict's life, but while the drug use continues, 
you're only delaying the inevitable.  
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake