Needle Exchanges and Safe Injection Sites - Insight on Insite

Are tax dollars being spent on Hells Angels cocaine at the Vancouver safe injection site? Cocaine was used in 26% of the injections there. Needle exchanges are supposed to be exchanges where a drug user brings an old dirty needle and gets a new clean one in exchange. The idea was to encourage drug users to stop throwing their used needles on the ground which would be a health risk to the public.

However, some areas like Victoria modified the idea and just started handing out free needles without collecting old ones. As a result residents became very frustrated with the City promoting drug use in their neighbourhood which resulted in used needles everywhere and a whole host of other unpleasant social problems.

Line ups for free needles were became longer than line ups for free pancakes or for Boxing day sales and drug traffickers jumped at the expanding market. How can you have a line up for a free needle and say you're not allowed to sell drugs to them?

Thus the drug laws are being violated and lawlessness is the result. How can you have a line up of people waiting for a free needle and say you can buy heroine but you can't buy crack. They didn't. As a result the line ups for free needles became a haven for crack dealers and all the associated social problems.

So the lobbyists take the next step and start handing out free crack pipes and free mouth pieces in a twisted definition of harm reduction pretending it has anything to do with the Four Pillars Program. They all cry about the four pillar program and repeat harm reduction like a drug induced mantra while they completely ignore the other three pillars of the program.

Then the lobbyists take the next step and try and turn the safe injection site for heroine addicts to a safe inhalation site for people to smoke crack. That is insane. The lobbyists must either be on crack or are profiting for organized crime selling the illegal drugs.

Then we have the lobbyists who cry about prohibition and try to legalize every drug under the sun. They exploit the legalization of pot movement, join with them then refuse to draw any lines whatsoever in their policy and cry out for the legalization of all drugs and blame those upstanding citizens who oppose crime and drug use as evil oppressors. How absurd.

Legalizing crack and meth is socially irresponsible. Take a look at what those drugs do to people. Are we going to buy alcoholics alcohol to feed their habit? That would not be in the alcoholic's best interest.

Legalizing every drug under the sun would not be in the public's best interest. People would still have to pay for the drug and would still have to commit crime to pay for it. Providing free drugs for them to use would be insane and help use up whatever money we currently spend on social programs like welfare and health care.

Yet the lobbyists refuse to draw lines and give and inch take a mile becomes the policy of spoilt brats throwing temper tantrums and screaming until we give them every illicit substance on a silver platter while the health care system continues to spiral down the toilet of nonexistence. Look at the Emergency line ups and the MRI wait lists as it is.

Feeding the hungery, housing the homeless and clothing the naked are good things. Giving alcohol to alcoholics or drugs to drug addicts is not. Especially at the tax payers expense. The last thing we need is to move from lawlessness to anarchy but that is clearly the direct we are heading. That is not the society that I want to live in. We need to embrace the New York model and leave Amsterdam for Amsterdam.