"Harm Reduction" is a one-way street.
(www.cbc.ca)
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Here's what I've seen from safe injection sites so far.
They put them in the middle of every downtown and they turn a 5-block radius into somewhere that no sane person would want to visit.
You know those cool stores you like to visit? (After paying for parking.) You'll have to walk past 3 people who are leaning out and step over another to get there. You won't feel safe. It will be gross.
That nice park that everyone used to enjoy? All the benches will be filled with unwashed junkies doped out of their gourds. That playground in which your kids would like to play? It almost certainly contains a few uncapped needles which may or may not be tainted with HIV.
Harm reduction does nothing but make downtowns disgusting.
It was a good idea. It was a compassionate idea. But it was a massive failure because if you subsidize junkies, you'll get more junkies and that enabling opiate addictions only hurts the people that you('re pretending you) want to save.
I'd actually go softer than that.
None of that actually works. Keeping the drugs out of the prisons is damn near impossible and cracking down on addicts just makes it harder for them to re-enter society.
My thoughts would be:
Step 1. Crack down on vagrancy, crack down on panhandling, crack down on being high in public, crack down on the gangs who are dealing the opioids in the first place. Make being a drug addict suck. No more tent cities, no more chatting with the gang at the old safe injection site after easily scoring in the safe-dealing zone. No one quits a drug when they're enjoying it and it's a fun part of their day.
Step 2. Provide opportunity. The real impetus to quit a drug is the idea that life will get better. Job, food, beer, housing. These things need to be a realistic fantasy for those who contemplate sobering up.
The thing about someone who is suicidal, even when (especially when!) they're doing it in slow-motion is that they need to be convinced that things will get better and they're in the middle of a short-term crisis which will soon be over.
Make being a junkie unpleasant and provide a more pleasant alternative. A decent future.
That's all we need to conquer the epidemic.
It's the hippy ideal of compassion. The idea that by making life easy, and giving support that you can love someone into realizing the error of their ways and deciding to be a decent human being.
That shit doesn't work, it never worked which is probably why the hippies themselves were the ones to invent "tough love" (throwing your teenaged kids out of the house for the most minor of indiscretions) and the concept of enabling itself.
The solution for the problem is the middle road.
Being a junkie is not fun. It just isn't. They're tethered to doing a drug, they can't work, they don't feel proud of themselves, their lifestyle sucks, and their social circle becomes limited to junkies as they burn every person who ever loved them (especially their "enablers" because they know more than anyone what they're doing.)
The only real solution to it make it as unpleasant as possible to be a junkie and to make sure that even our lowest-wage workers have opportunity.
In other words, we crack down on users viciously but the only punishment is 10 hours in the pillory, without trial.
Sometimes we need to listen to the wisdom of our elders and the problem of addiction is one of those times. Bringing back the pillory would be effective.