I refuse to be deceived!!!

By: James Burge

I’m not sure whether to be shocked or to feel stupid for thinking things in Canada could be different.  In what can only be described as taking a page from the US playbook the RCMP have used taxpayers money to fund a study designed to undermine the work of Insite, BC’s safe injection site designed for harm reduction of a niche of society that has been effectively marginalized federally.  Insite, despite the a conservative witch hunt “has been subject to rigorous, independent third party research and evaluation by the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, recognized as one of the world’s leading research organizations.” Taken from its own site, some of the results include:

 

• increased uptake into detoxification programs and addiction treatment. (New England Journal of Medicine)
• has not led to an increase in drug-related crime, rates of arrest for drug trafficking, assaults and robbery were similar after the facility’s opening, and rates of vehicle break-ins/theft declined significantly. (Substance Abuse Treatment, Prevention, and Policy)
• reduced the number of people injecting in public and the amount of injection-related litter in the downtown eastside. (Canadian Medical Association Journal)
• attracting the highest-risk users – those more likely to be vulnerable to HIV infection and overdose, and who were contributing to problems of public drug use and unsafe syringe disposal. (American Journal of Preventive Medicine)
• reduced overall rates of needle sharing in the community, and among those who used the supervised injection site for some, most or all of their injections, 70% were less likely to report syringe sharing. (The Lancet)
• Nearly one-third of Insite users received information relating to safer injecting practices. Those who received help injecting from fellow injection drug users on the streets were more than twice as likely to have received safer injecting education at Insite. (The International Journal of Drug Policy)
• Insite is not increasing rates of relapse among former drug users, nor is it a negative influence on those seeking to stop drug use. (British Medical Journal)
• Insite is preventing overdose deaths and reducing hospital visits (The International Journal of Drug Policy)

Source: http://www.vch.ca/sis/research.htm

 

The problem is that all the above mentioned benefits to society aren’t enough for the conservatives who are still trying to push an incarceration/punitive based approach to drug enforcement. It seems that the RCMP agree, so much so, after receiving reports from two separate studies which didn’t effectively demonize Insite, they went back for two more, one of which was headed “by the director of a national drug-prevention organization that opposes Insite.”

 

This type of cherry picking from only those studies that reinforce policy IS NOT ACCEPTABLE!!! This is the same type of shit that convinced the US that Saddam had Newkuler weapons!!!

 

Its amazing to me, that a Canadian politician can suggest adopting an almost 40 year old failed US policy and have ppl (‘conservitives?’) buy it as a ‘hard on crime’ policy, when it is really just a policy to incarcerate those who obviously need help. This wouldn’t be successful if addicts hadn’t already been marginalized, and organized crime linked so closely with the drug trade, a link which can be blamed solely on the type of prohibition a ‘war-on-drugs’ tends to propagate. (I thought we were smarter than that, but I’m not surprised to see Harper prove me wrong, again, and again and… well you get the picture)

 

When political policy begins to influence the same studies used to sell the policy to the public, its called DECEPTION!!! I refuse to be deceived!!!

No related posts.