Safe injection sites as 'harm reduction'? Bull! If anything, it's 'harm promotion'--Saving dope fiends from the negative consequences of addiction does them no favours whatsoever. And yes, unfortunately DEATH is one of the possible consequences. Let's take the money put into the black hole of SIS and put it toward abstention-based treatment.

Good thing we have these brutal bobbies to keep us on track. "Saving dope fiends from the negative consequences of addiction does them no favours whatsoever," he waxes ever so wisely. Like 'keeping the poor out of poor houses doesn't teach those malcontents anything about debt', or 'keeping prostitutes away from brutal johns doesn't teach these women they too don't count in some people's eyes. Thank you Larry Campbell for not hiding your head in the sand because some voters may think harm reduction is "controversial". Of course it is and so is pretending it doesn't exist just because you might lose a vote or two. But rather than focussing on the "controversial", I just wish my mayor in Kamloops would understand his job is to lead rather than follow by focussing on the "harm", which, once you accept it as a reality, should naturally lead to an effort to reduce it. We need real leaders rather than politicians who are afraid to pull back the curtain.

Hooray for brutal bobby T! I'm all for his approach, speaking in my professional capacity as The Personification of Death Itself, I say we arm bobby with deadly weapons and let him wreak his own visionary version of harm reduction on everyone! The victims aren't worthwhile at all, hardly human, so what's the loss?

Besides, people like the idea of having the power to dispose of those who can't defend themselves as much as they like sucking up to those with the power to dispose of themselves.

Hey brutal bobby, are you involved in the Surrey School Board's proposed abstention-based sex education proposal as well? "Just say no" was certainly a brilliant success south of the border; just look at their stats regarding addiction. I suggest that you're not only a troll, you're a fool....

As for the 'negative consequences of addiction', harm reduction also refers to reducing the amount of harm to society as a whole, not just the addict.

Safe injection sites and free clinical heroin will not only save addicts' lives, they will help prevent the spread of HIV and Hepatitus, they will help control the cost of our ICBC premiums, and save us tax $$ by not having to scour the alleys cleaning up used needles.

Anyone can plainly see that the situation requires drastic measures. Whether or not you agree with the morality of a safe injection site is a moot point, it's time for us to try anything to help these poor people.

addicton I THoUGHT WAS A MEDICAL PROBLEM. THERE IS A VENIPUNTURIST INJECTION DEVICE THAT WITH OUT A NEEDLE INJECTION UNDERHIGH PRESSURe BLOWS DRUG,ETC. UNDERSKIN. It's cost is not prohibitive since it can used over and over, why not get trained peole to inject this addicted to minimize harm from hiv/aids hepc,etc. Drugs could be procured by m.d.'s, and persriptions could be filled at clinics free by the gov't. Thereby eliminating the profit motive , turf wars, snitching on one another to police etc. the whole gamut needs new vision. WHY OH WHY DOES THE GOV'T. GIVE MONEY TO ADDICTS? MONEY THAT ONLY GOES TO THE DEALERS ARE THE BUREAUCRATS THIS STUPID? or what. Bust up the myth that addicts are not sick but made achoice to do it.

Nobody (at least not me) said addiction wasn't a sickness. X-mayor Owen is a fool who came under the thrall of VANDU deadbeats---Mayor Larry is no better--he parrots the opinions of the last person he spoke to....BTW, in case you didn't guess, I'm also against needle exchanges--ask the people of the DES if the drug plague has been eased in the slightest degree by these misguided dupes. Why do you people so under-rate what other people are capable of? I want to see dope fiends clean up & become useful citizens, not remain walking zombies. Recovery is a simple process, but it ain't easy.

And, bobby, while the addicts are making efforts to detox and kick the habbit, they have a safe place to inject for the times when they do have relapses. They will have relapses since they are addicted for life just like for alcohol or tabacco.

I think brutal bobby is right. Let's round up the drug users and sit them in jail without access to their drugs until they get clean. When they sober up, ship them out of town to work camps where they'll learn the value of a hard day's work. Nothing gives a man a sense of pride and accomplishment like a full day's work (on a chain gang). At every meal there will be strictly enforced religious re-education. After six months of unpaid labour a worker can apply to leave the camp. He is given $250 and told to find work within the month. If he fails, it's back to jail--one strike and you're out. Back to the work camp until you shape up.

Harm Reduction methods not only reduce harm to the community,they save thousands of dollars in health care by reducing overdoses as well as absesses and other ailments that result from unsafe injections. Perscription Heroin would take the profits away from the gangs that currently make millions on the black market, not to mention it would reduse the murders and beatings that result from turf wars. Property crimes will drop as the addicts won't have to steal in order to feed their addiction. Harm Reduction will do exactly that, REDUCE HARM, for the whole community, not just the addicts

The senior level of government makes it illegal to use or possess these nasty drugs. The junior level of government enables these poor souls to continue their addiction and wretched existence. Is the good mayor Campbell breaking the law by helping these addicts break the federal law? Where is that disgusting little fellow Randy White while all this is going on? Mr White should wear his white stetson and help enforce the federal laws he claims to respect so much. After our leaders vote themselves another raise, they should look at this mess and revise their archaic laws, or start enforcing them.

Many sensible comments have been made to justify "harm reduction"-- but I'm always surprised that it needs justification. Surely if all harm from drugs were removed, the problem would be solved, wouldn't it. Seems obvious, but then it mustn't be: brutal bobby writes "Saving dope fiends from the negative consequences of addiction does them no favours whatsoever" -- what are the laws trying to achieve? The fact the special interest groups and their spokesmen such as John Walters see a crisis in solving the problem rather than expanding inforcement is, on the other hand, quite unsurprising. Remember taxes for you and me == wages for John and his fellow feeders on the misery of drug users.

David, interesting how this all gets back to your taxes. Put away your investment statements, turn off the calculator and pay attention. Despite the good news about harm reduction, after decades of bad press about Vancouver as the mean, bleak end-of-the-road for so many, people like you and John Walters still don't get it.

A doctor friend of mine who works in addictions research told me that "for every dollar spent on harm reduction, $4 less is spent on hospitalizations" Anyone out there who can verify these numbers?

Some excellent points, IQ86!! I think a year would be minimum for the necessary re-programming, not six months. We could dispense with the chain gang, although there would be a requirement to earn one's keep. I would steer away from the 'religious' aspect somewhat as well, and have daily speakers and intensive group therapy as well. Don't forget the weekly urinalysis!

PS--ANYONE WHO KNOWS ANYONE IN SURREY PANORAMA RIDGE SHOULD MAKE SURE THEY GET THEM TO THE POLLS FOR THE BYELECTION TOMORROW, THIS IS IMPORTANT, WITH THE BC FIBERALS WITH ALL THE MEDIA IN HAND WE NEED ALL THE SUPPORT WE CAN GET....MAKE SURE THEY NOTE NDP..

Alan...In what sense does it all get back to taxes? I mention taxes for a good reason, I think. Many of those who seem reflexively dubious about the efficacy of government interventions and uniformly treat statements from policy advocates (e.g. environmentalists) as covert efforts to raise funds for themselves, somehow manage to listen to advocates of more drug law enforcement intervention with a straight face, and worse to support endless additional funding despite the enormous failure of present practices. Why? Surely the "war on drugs" is as large and costly failure as any other government program you can name, including Fast Ferries. I think reminding reluctant supporters of reforms of this inconsistency is perhaps part of the solution. All I desire is that they ask to see evidence to support positions, and I think harm reduction will win on the merits. Anyway I'm not sure what I don't get. Re-read my post, which could have been clearer no doubt. I await reply from someone willing to provide reasons why reducing harm would somehow paradoxically make users worse off; I've heard this stated before, but really don't see the logic. Hence my question. Then I added, off topic, a warning about listening to self-interested advocates seeking your tax dollars. I notice the very next poster mentions the potential savings from shifting focus -- so maybe Alan you have some higher motive (there are plenty), but why dismiss a sensible argument just because it is not the whole story? Why not remind readers that John Walters and his ilk are promoting a failed program to their own benefit, and that this explains their hostility to experiments open to disprove their dire warnings. Why does this logic require a calculator?

David, it doesn't require a calculator and I apologize (I'm doing lots of that these days) for misreading your thoughts. My initial reaction to your post was the thought that you were too deeply inbedded in your own day-to-day finances to get beyond what this was going to cost you personally. That obviously isn't what you meant to say as is evident in your last posting here. I guess it's time to get on my bike and burn off some of this fog and then try a little harm reduction myself by putting my glasses back on. David, you are right. John Walters and his ilk are a bad drain on our taxes.

I think that the debate about safe injection could be improved by a reiteration of the goal, which is harm reduction, not harm elimination. A sterile needle merely reduces the chance of secondary infection. I'm sure we all agree that the contents are still very dangerous for the user.

Just before the second war, prohibition was repealed, removing a huge income from Sicilian-American criminal 'families' who had established a monopoly position supplying booze to the entire US.

During the war the American Military Intelligence community recruited many Sicilian Mafiosi such as Joe Bonanno to prepare a welcome for American troops who would 'invade' Sicily to open a second front in Europe. This 'invasion' went so well that in at least one case it was reported that the troops were met by the mayor and town band, showing respect to the Mafia's request. The Intelligence community was very impressed and rewarded the Mafiosi in question by releasing them from jail and returning them to their homes in Italy after the war. They maintained those relationships and continued to be so closely allied to the underworld that it has become difficult to tell them apart. And underworld interests now require that nobody ever repeal the prohibition against drugs, which have replaced booze as the cornerstone of the enormous fortunes made at the cost of millions of lives ruined.

This is the only theory I have ever been able to see that could begin to explain the American insistance on maintaining this disastrous seventy year failure of a policy of theirs.

Bailey -- I agree that "prohibition" funded the crucial organizational stages of US organised crime, an organization that outlived the law itself. Once founded, it used its structure (and in particular violent gang tactics)to pursue illegal gambling, tax fraud etc. I am certain we are making the same mistake now in Canada, handing billions of dollars to a group of people who I can only view as violent, low-life scumbags. Seems an odd policy choice, given the historical evidence. To what extent there is or was a "deal" with old line mafiosi I can't testify. No doubt the Hell's Angels are not advocates of legalization. Earlier I asserted that the law enforcement agencies have motives for continuing the failed approach also. But I do think there is another explanation for the "keep digging" metality following 70 years of ever worsening results: social control of "undesirables". Some police are (perhaps inadvertently) quite open about these motives: e.g. the new "safe streets" laws were greeted by at least one police spokesperson *not* as "at long last we can stop these attacks on innocent passersby" (we have assault laws to cover that), but as "another tool" to deal with recalcitrant street people. I live in Victoria, and am always surprised by the fantasies of danger on our streets I've heard from otherwise reasonable people, based solely, as far as I can tell, from the shabby appearance of a few young adults. So this is popular. Race is another factor, perhaps the most important in the US, where the focus on stopping African Americans from "harming themselves with drugs" was certainly intensified if not wholly initiated after the demise of Jim Crow. Sceptical? Go search for "Janey Cannuck", importer of racist drug policy, and try to realise that some people still think that way. And alas, the majority react in instinctive fear, even if they can convince themselves they are not racist. (Since the drug laws are supposed to be colour blind.) This only works because of selective enforcement, anathma to any true believers in the rule of law. Examples and evidence abounds, but prison populations are perhaps the best measure. Anyone who thinks that the multibillion dollar drug trade is funded by the worn down heroin addicts milling around downtown is arithmetically as well as morally and logically challenged.

David, all that is undoubtedly true, but I would argue it falls into the secondary category of mechanics. The policy is not explained by the abuses it allows. The fact that bigots and abusive officials love to have 'tools'is anciliary, not causal. There are always bigots, and thay will always find a way to abuse somebody.

Most of the arguments we will be hearing here will be basically Darwinian. Death will cure their addictions, they weren't fit to survive anyway, there is such a thing as free will, etc, etc,. The victimizer's laments to justify the condition of the victims.

The ultimate expression of Darwinian thought as social policy was of course the Eugenics Movement of the twenties and thirties which began with forced sterilisation of 'defectives' and ended in the gas chambers of the third Reich. A thoroughly discredited and dangerous way of thinking.

Of course, the goal now is no longer racial purity, but something else, political purity, or financial purity or some combination of the two. The crime of the victims is compound, and has two parts:

First, they are defiant of authority, they think for themselves that the state has no right to dictate, and they will decide what uses to put their own brains and bodies to. And so they are caught up and addicted.

Second, and more heinous, they then become poor and powerless, and that more and more is the crime for which they are condemned. In BC lately, to be poor is unforgivable. The poor have no civil rights, no right to live, to be in the public places, to be fed, or sheltered from the cold and rain, to medical care, psychiatric care, clothing, or protection from those who ache to find somebody to abuse. From the 'tools' of the BC government.

There's an old saying "To know what a thing is, watch what it eats". A good way to judge a government or any force really, is by how it behaves toward those who are in it's power. Those with no means of defending themselves. The BC government thinks of nothing but money. It's their faith, their weapon. their love and their truth. No other need apply. So they oppose these treatment strategies unless financial agruments are brought to bear. But the BC government represents only a small minority of wealthy like minded people, and the rest have other priorities they can't understand, and those people are not entirely penniless or powerless, so we see these programs start up and struggle without official support as long as they can. I find hope in the idea that these ideas are spreading despite the obstruction placed in their way by 'tools'.

The world needs to know that not all Americans support the political insanity of our country. People like Johns Walter & Ashcroft do not represent what the average American thinks. Our politicians are a danger to the world and the demon bin Laden has given them carte blanche. So look out world! Telling you how to deal with your drug users is only the beginning.

thanks Bailey for truely riveting reading.esp.on oct27 I had not pointed out as you stated the effects of addictive culture ,loss of full life,mea culpa. Additional it should be realised that house insurance rates esclate into the stratosphere eventually [this is a Manhattan experience].Legal action on a class action scale was required to effect some relief to home owners when the NYC after 1990 had a drop in crime rate. Will a repeat performance grant windfall profits to insurers in Vancouver/victoria ? Yet to be noted in the press. Wholesale purchase of heroin/cocaine will reduce crime no doubt about it. Medical perscripted / injected drugs will reduce harm. A close acquaintance says he can get by on a maintenance level of heroin,and needs very little to "float along"[ not feeling desperate i think he means]. I donot advocate work camps /indoctrination camps, i actually think the writers of that slant must be playing the devil's advocate stance.Very few visitors to "insite" injection establishment have opted for cessation treatment[72 perons i understand] We must get over the idea that these addicted folk are the author of their own misfortune many dealers need the addicts for income plain as that.

Rereading David's post above here I begin to wonder. This idea of 'social control of undesirable recalcitrant street people' Let me offer some historical connections and see if I can make a point. It may be a bit of a stretch, so please bear with me.

When the Kennedy brothers and Dr. King were murdered, it was widely believed by certain segments of society that it amounted to a coup d'etat by certain reactionary, largely southwestern interests, known collectively as the "military industrial complex", or "the man". The war in Viet Nam had been exposed as corrupt and morally bankrupt, and these same segments of society were convinced that these honorable leaders were killed because they wouldn't go along with it; the war, the status quo which provided huge profits and power to the military establishment and war industries. They, the dissenters, resented it.

While most Americans went baa-ing along the path they were being led down, a growing number insisted on thinking. Seeing and deciding things for themselves. Disenfranchised blacks, who contributed disproportionately to fill the thousands of coffins streaming back from Asia. Students, alive in the world of ideas and information, with resources for seeking truth. Young working class whites who believed in the principles of Democracy and freedom, and were willing to insist on them and fight for them even against their own government, who they felt were in fact criminals and usurpers.

Things deteriorated. Demonstrations were held all over; campuses, the Pentagon. American troops fired on American students in Ohio. The slums in several cities were burnt by their own residents, who rioted in protest among the burning neighbourhoods. A corrupt president fell and the dishonourable war was ended.

I point out that those neighbourhoods that burnt are the same ones where drugs are now rampant. That these same groups are the ones who are most highly addicted. That the drug policies under discussion originated or at least were organised in those places at about that time.

And that nobody has burnt a slum or successfully opposed authority since, although the actions of authority are still at least as morally bankrupt and corrupt as they ever were then.

Get a clue on drug use! I have friends who have been on drugs for 15 years and they have never commited any crime for their partying. It's paying bills first, then after all is taken of they will go out once or twice a month and party for the evening. Not all people who use drugs are criminals.

Mordred must not have any hard core heroin addicts, the drug is 1st. I applaud Canada for trying a new approach, the U S does not understand that they are not stopping the flow of heroin, etc. and only making the dealers richer, and the vulnerable public more at risk. When their children succumb to the dark depths of heroin addiction maybe they will open their eyes.

is there anyone against these houses of crime?