Not such a cracked idea

While I support harm-reduction drug strategies like needle exchanges and safe injection sites, initially I had a pretty negative response to Vancouver Island's upcoming crack pipe distribution program:

"A crack-pipe distribution program driven out of Nanaimo by city council will become available throughout Vancouver Island in the new year.

The distribution will be at needle exchanges in Victoria, Nanaimo, Campbell River and Courtenay, and mobile units running in most Island communities, said Murray Fyfe." [...]

"For the first time, the Ministry of Health's harm reduction supply and services program will fund crack-pipe components -- such as plastic mouthpieces and filters -- through the B.C. Centre for Disease Control."

Nanaimo is close to where I live, and my rural neighbourhood is routinely looted by marauding crackheads from "town" (including my place -- twice). So my unthinking, kneejerk response to the crack pipe distribution program was "Noooo!!"

But then, that was my first response to safe injection sites. I thought they were a bad idea, not because of any moral opposition to drug use (it should be purely a health problem), but because I couldn't believe addicts would actually use them. The possibility that addicts might stop shooting up in doorways because there was a safe injection site 3 or 4 blocks away just didn't square with what I knew to be true from serious drug users of my acquaintance (in another life). I knew one cocaine user who was arrested shooting up in a Mcdonald's washroom... 2 blocks away from his home. Why he couldn't wait until he'd traversed the 2 blocks to the ultimate safe injection site -- his house -- is one of addiction's many riddles. Many addicts are driven and desperate enough to indulge the moment they acquire their drugs, wherever and whenever that may to be. So I couldn't see how a safe injection site would keep junkies from shooting up in the street, unless they happened to rendezvous with their dealers right outside the place.

Happily, I was wrong. Insite has been operational for 4 years and (much to the disgruntlement of the White House) all indications are that it works. Not only does it provide a safe place for drug users to do what they'd otherwise be doing in a park or alleyway, it gives them access to medical care, counselling, and ultimately, programs that help them leave drugs behind. It removes some of the anonymity that accompanies illicit drug use and makes it so easy for such people to be victimized. It helps stem the overwhelming tide of HIV and Hep-C. What it demonstrably does not do is encourage more drug use. Like the needle exchange programs from which safe injection sites evolved, there's no reason to believe that a crack pipe program would be anything but another effective harm reduction strategy.

Of course, as long as drugs remain illegal and therefore, astronomically expensive, users will continue committing crimes to finance their habits. Harm reduction can't address the problems that our idiotic laws engender. And Stephen Harper's statement about harm reduction -- "It is a second-best strategy at best, because if you remain a drug addict, I don't care how much harm you reduce, you're going to have a short and miserable life." -- is emblematic of that idiocy.