Vancouver Celebrates Addiction - Hastings Street Closed to Traffic

 Street Party to Support Insite Safe Injection Center

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Addicts deserve better than Insite

By Paul Schratz

The federal government announced $10 million last week for new programs to treat drug addiction in the Downtown Eastside.
Included in the spending is the opening of 20 new beds to offer prostitutes a safe haven while helping them to beat the addictions that forced them into prostitution. The story didn't make it onto the front page of a single daily paper in Vancouver.  In fact everyone buried it, in one case as a two-inch brief under a short item about a suspicious looking drug bong in Saanich. Funding to help prostitutes get off the street just isn't as juicy a story as those about legalized brothels or red-light districts, nor is it as fascinating as the question of whether the legalized drug shooting gallery known as Insite will receive the legal extension so long hoped for by some drug advocates. At the press conference where the federal health minister announced the drug funding, reporters asking questions focused almost entirely on Insite instead. They had some tough questions about whether the federal government was using the announcement as a way to defer criticism should it ultimately close Insite. How odd. Drug addiction and prostitution are wreaking devastation in the Downtown Eastside. The addictive lifestyles of drug addiction and prostitution ensnare individuals in cycles of poverty, crime, and often death. Yet when government announces a program to help drug addicted prostitutes beat their addictions and get off the street, the response is to ignore it and to ask why a program that has failed to do what it was supposed to is not being further promoted.The obvious reason, of course, is that programs that help individuals beat the vices that enslave them don't fit the standard mould for dealing with vices. The zeal to have Insite's licence extended is more about backing away from a prosecution approach to drugs than it is to helping addicts beat their deadly habit. It seems to me the arguments for and against Insite have always been misguided.As with the issue of safe sex and condoms, the central question is not how effective Insite is, although we may care about effectiveness because we care about the people these "solutions" are aimed at. Insite's future should be determined by its inherent qualities and its overall impact on our society. Purely on those points, it fails. It gives a green light to drug abuse, hides a moral problem from public view, and helps fosters a sense that drug addiction is under control as a public policy issue. Even if Insite completely transformed the Downtown Eastside, as opposed to actually contributing to the misery there, it would remain the wrong approach, for precisely the same reason that moving your Tylenol to the low shelf in your medicine cabinet is not the way to prevent children from falling off a stool when reaching for the top shelf. Unfortunately this is the way we've become accustomed to responding to destructive behaviours. Rather than trying to prevent them, we're content to mitigate the harm associated with them. So instead of addressing prostitution, we promote red light districts. Rather than teach drug awareness, we encourage legalization. We throw condoms at children as an alternative to abstinence. And when car thieves keep crashing while being pursued by police, we tell the police not to give chase any more. Christian charity requires that we exhibit compassion in our lives. It calls us to go out in search of the lost sheep and to rescue them, not to simply pat them on the head while they go astray. It means finding ways so the sheep don't go astray, rather than telling the shepherd not to rescue them.

Insite has moved a public drug horror indoors, rendering it "Outofsite." Turning it into a more comfortable procedure as far as we're concerned, however, also helps to absolve us of responsibility to help addicts. The federal government's approach to drugs and prostitution makes much more sense than Insite's does, from a moral and a practical perspective.©  Copyright 2006. The BC Catholic. All Rights Reserved