Safe Injection Site

During the AIDS conference in Toronto this summer Bill Clinton spoke. He had a lot to say but what it mostly boiled down was, hey, let's stop judging people and help them instead.

I know it doesn't need to be said, but this guy runs planet-sized circles around George W. Bush. Dick-sucking and all. Just the fact that he's an orator, and can turn a phrase, can friends-Romans-countrymen ideas around and make them suddenly clear to everyone listening, is qualification alone. Granted, I'm happy George is not similarly skilled and is not able to make everyone see his rich asshole way of thinking as the path to wisdom.

Anyway, one of the things Clinton talked about was that abstinence education is bullshit and a waste of time and the energy and money should instead be spent on helping young people make informed choices about their sexuality. I read somewhere else recently that some high school in the American heartland decided to abandon its abstinence education in favour of sex education when they discovered 13% of the girls in the school were pregnant. Someone pointed out to Clinton that he had supported abstinence education when he was president, and he said, "I was wrong."

Okay, so in the line of Clinton's sage advice (re: judging vs. helping) the Canadian Feds recently allowed Vancouver's experimental safe injection site (the only such program in North America) to remain open for at least another year and a half. For anyone who has not experienced Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, it's a nightmare-scape district of people ravaged by drug and alcohol abuse. Vancouver and Victoria draw a lot of homeless people because of their (relatively) mild winters and the Downtown Eastside becomes the area of congregation. Needle-sharing and overdoses lead to rampant disease and death.

The safe injection site is obviously not the solution to a complex problem, but the idea behind it is so great: officially acknowledge the fact that people are going to engage in unsafe behaviour and treat them like humans. Give them opportunities to help themselves and educate themselves in their choices and provide them with the bare minimum of care. People go wrong, but that doesn't mean they should be abandoned as garbage.

Anyway, I rank people who hurt themselves with drugs as not quite as low as those who those who hurt others, by, say, going to Asia to have sex with children or beating their own families. If public policy should punish and abandon anyone, let's start with those people.