I’ve never met Gerry Verrier but when I posted a link to his recent editorial on Insite he graciously left a comment here on SDA. It’s well worth a read:
My how words travel quickly on the interwebs….Good discussion going on here.
My voice is but one of many who will share the same thoughts, if asked. I, as well as other co-workers attending a conference in Regina on addictions several years ago, were branded as anti-harm reduction because we challenged the thinking behind harm reduction. I just could not bear listening to a parole officer gush about how proud she was of a particular inmate who had a history of armed robberies and who during his last brief stint in the community, had robbed a store without using a gun and was back in prison. This was her example of how well harm reduction worked.
Of course if the research materials and papers being produced to advance Insite and other harm reduction projects are being produced by harm reductionists, does anyone really think they are going to interview me for my insight on the topic? Not likely.
I’ve been working in this field for almost 25 years. In this facilty we work with well over 350 people each year. Men, women, GBLT folks, retired folks, 18 year olds, youth, families, dependent children, men and women doing re-unification with children who have been apprehended would be the people you would see in our facilities. We work with clients who come from the street, who come from prison, who come from detox facilities, who come from remote communities in the north, who come from the military, basically people from all walks of life.
Having said that, I’d like to think I have good insight into the lifestyle and the treatment process.
Overwhelmingly, the three most important things identified by our clients in consumer based program surveys are routine, structure and sobriety. Following those three are having a safe environment, and having counsellors who have been through addictions themselves.
There is total value in investing in rehab. People in rehab are clean, going to school, working in the community and paying taxes and learning how to earn their way through the world, parenting their children, cleaning up the neighborhood, dealing with trauma, learning about the dangers of addictions and criminal thinking,improving their health through holisitc means, learning budgeting skills, developing solid life goals, and it goes on and on.
Going to Insite provides none of that.
As to coerced or mandated treatment, take a person who is resistant to change and immerse them in an environment where former addicts are engaged in programs and watch the shift in their attitude and thinking. When they see how their peers are engaged in doing positive things, and how non-threatening treatment can be, it can be incredibly catchy. We see it happen all the time.
Yeah but the huge and growing infrastructure isn’t there..and then all those former addicts working in jobs that should be done by “better educated” people. Goodness, some of those former addicts even have tattoos!! Why some of them appear to actually be friends with “them”.
Much text no evidence against Insite. Would Verrier’s definition of a safe environment not include random infections and getting robbed while high? Because if so, then Insite is right. Just cut off it’s public funding already.
“Much text no evidence against Insite”
for those of us who are street smarts and have had loved ones who were drug addicts, the proof of the harm of harm reduction BS is larger than life
http://dpnoc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Lancet2011InsiteAnalysis.pdf
Good link
Why do they keep calling it “Harm Reduction”, when we all know they really mean, Harm Redistribution?
Gerry – thanks for enuciating and giving voice to what I believe most “thinking-normal” Canadians would believe. Come on back and give us some more of your thoughts on other issues
I do think we should rename the planet earth Bizzaro. Wasn’t that the place in Superman comics where everything was backwards/upside down and inside out..?
Common Sense. 2 words…I just dont see the application anymore in damned near everything these days.
Happy thanksgiving folks.!
trollbertarian said: “Much text no evidence against Insite.”
As it turns out, if you read the other thread this comment came from (if you can read), most of the “evidence” supporting Insite is either fabricated or just wrong.
“Harm reduction” is one of those nice buzz phrases so beloved of bureaucrats. Its sounds important, it sounds like it means something, and it sounds good rolling off the tongue in a meeting filled with bleeding-heart political party donors. But its a meaningless noise standing in for a stupid and pernicious idea.
We have seen this freak show before. Gun control = harm reduction = human rights tribunals, right down to the bogus “studies” and the useful idiots pushing it.
Go find me a scientifically sound study on any of those three subjects, trollbertarian. Something that isn’t pure propaganda hacked together by a bunch of partisan knobs and paid for by a liberal/lefty foundation like Tides . Just one.
What this country lacks is adequate treatment centers, 12 beds in my province that’s it for addiction treatment. I abhor Insite and what it stands for, I have lost five uncles do to drug overdoses, both my brothers are recovering addicts. One of my uncles shared his needle with his siblings and two of his daughters, the result they all contacted Hep. C. Would insite of saved any of my loved ones, no of course not junkies don’t keep insite hours they’ll share needles and spread desease when insite isn’t open.
Why would “they” want addicts to get better?
Making them better removes the reason, and funding, for safe injection sites. Why derail the gravy train?
I had a friend doing a soc degree at Capilano College in Vancouver a while back. She had to write a paper on Insite for a course she was taking, and asked me to proof it.
The paper was in favour of Insite and regurgitated all the BS given out by its supporters. I showed her Singapore’s LTI (Long Term Imprisonment) strategy. If you’re selling the stuff they hang you. Even weed. If a doctor says you’re an addict, you get a mandatory 4 years in rehab (which is separate from the regular prison population). Their recidivism rate is less than 1 in 1000. Singapore has the lowest rates of drug use and drug-related infections in the OECD at a fraction of the cost of Canadian programs.
She couldn’t use LTI in her paper. The teacher (I won’t call her a Professor) would have failed her.
@crjc: telling that drug warriors look up to a police state as their model.
@Phantom: I read Kay’s piece and it was really just nitpicking at the edges. Fact is, just about every major organization in Vancouver supports Insite from the Vancouver PD to the Chinese Business Association.
One issue that is being totally neglected is the psychiatric conditions present among addicts. 50% of them have bipolar2 (BAD2) and I’ve had arguments with some rehab programs who don’t want people enrolled in them to be an any drugs (aside from nicotine and caffeine). There’s no point in putting someone with BAD2 into a rehab program and denying them the mood stabilizers that they need to function well.
As far as insite goes, there are a couple of ways it can be taken down. The first is a class action suit by Vancouver residents who have been victims of either vehicle or residential breakins. When a vehicle window gets broken so $0.50 can be stolen from the vehicle, there’s a 99% chance that this is an addict trying to get enough cash together to score. Since insite is facilitating this activity, a class action lawsuit is appropriate.
The other item that can sink insite has been provided by the dealers themselves – levamisole contaminated cocaine. When I first found out about the extent of addition of levamisole to cocaine I couldn’t believe that anyone could be that stupid. Silly me, I’d forgotten that human stupidity is limitless.
Levamisole is an old antihelminthic drug and is also used as an immune modulator in some chemotherapy regimens. It has some rather nasty side effects which include neutropenia and vasculitis. These effects are far more likely is someone is of Native Indian ancestry and this summer I’ve seen one case of marked neutropenia with a raging facial infection and a case of vasculitis. The only solution, should the people who get these conditions survive, is for them to totally abstain from illicit cocaine intake. Cocaine itself is quite safe when used in appropriate doses.
The harm reduction model would demand that no cocaine ingestion be allowed at insite. Unlikely to happen and all that would be needed would be one person who develops neutropenia or vasculitis to sue insite and the project is history.
The other piece of BS that insite propogates is that they are reducing the medical risks of iv drug use. Just because someone has sterile water and a sterile syringe doesn’t do anything to reduce the risks of contaminated drugs. Most dealers haven’t taken courses in maintenance of sterility of iv drugs and the product one gets on the street might be safe for intranasal use, but only an idiot would inject it without first sterilizing it using an appropriate sterile milipore filter.
I’m pretty sure the Insite verdict is precisely why they put the “Not withstanding clause” in the constitution.
Use it and shutdown the opium den.
“Fact is, just about every major organization in Vancouver supports Insite from the Vancouver PD to the Chinese Business Association.”
Oh,”consensus”, again.
The “First Pillar”,harm reduction doesn’t reduce harm,it merely reduces short term harm from overdoses.
The long term harm to the addict’s internal organs is exacerbated by the enabling of continued long term use of the drugs,with no apparent effort at Pillar Two,Three,or Four.
I understand the anti-establishment activism that prompts people to stand behind Insite,and I believe that activism is more important to them than any real desire to see addicts clean up their act and become non-taxpayer supported citizens.
The supporters of Insite march in the streets to keep the place open, but I’ve seen NO protests to get the other bloody “Pillars” enacted so we can get these people OFF the dope. The massage I get from the Insite supporters is NOT that they want the addicts off the dope.
Addicts cost the health care system big time,regardless of whether they shoot up at Insite,or in the alley,they have a myriad of health problems and are on a revolving door in the hospitals.
And,as far as break-ins by addicts to get money to pay for their drugs,if we’re going to give them a shoot-up center,might as well give them the drugs too.
THEN,enact the other sacred Pillars,and get ’em the hell off the dope,instead of mickey-mousing around stuck on Pillar One,as we have been for the last eight years.
trollbertarian said: “Fact is, just about every major organization in Vancouver supports Insite from the Vancouver PD to the Chinese Business Association.”
Great, so a bunch of ward-heelers are on board, but you’ve still got BUPKIS on the science end. All those same “major organizations” are in love with gun control too.
Colour me skeptical.
Harm redistribution is a key objective of the soft of head/heart, everywhere.
Nanaimo has instituted a series of ‘wet houses’ – meaning free housing for active addicts with no restrictions on ‘using’ within the facilities.
Rather than centering them around the area addicts prefer to reside, the city fathers have concluded that anyone should be able to live anywhere in the city they choose – regardless of income or whether they contribute to society.
So city councillors – not the addicts – have decided that the north end, some 15km from downtown, deserves a wet house, too. Never mind that it’s adjacent to a large senior’s housing facility of privately owned condo’s and just two blocks from both an elementary and a high school, the addicts have the same right to live in this higher income area as those who have invested for years and pay egregious property taxes.
Never mind that the addicts have no skin in the game, no responsibilities and no history in the suburban zone, the do-gooders appear to think that either local residents should disregard the evidence and show more ‘compassion’, or that by setting a better example for the addicts, the addicts will turn their lives around and soon be shopping for a mortgage themselves.
Blaming Insite for break-ins is completely asinine. They’re not responsible for the actions of their clients. Arrest and charge thieves as individuals.
@Loki: Millipore filters would be easy to distribute and use. So Insite should do it.
LAS – it’s perfectly reasonable to blame insite for breakins committed by junkies. Insite claims to be preventing overdose deaths and, as a result, one would expect an increase in the junkie population. Since virtually all male junkies engage in theft to support their habit, the increase in junkie numbers will increase property crime. (Female junkies have the option of engaging in prostitution although the rates they can charge their clients are inversely related to their duration of heavy drug use). This hypothesis can be easily tested and, if the numbers are in the expected direction, insite is at fault. I wouldn’t use police stats for this purpose as most people I knew in Vancouver didn’t bother reporting property crime as it was so epidemic.
Insite is simply a bad idea and it’s quite telling that not one of the physicians involved in the project has put their ass on the line by actually prescribing drugs to the addicts that frequent the site. That would make a lot more sense as it would represent community harm reduction.
The best solution would be to simply decriminalize the possession and sale of heroin and cocaine and let people defend their property with lethal force if necessary. This would result in insite being replaced by the modern equivlent of opium dens and a dramatic reduction in property crime. Prices of drugs would drop dramatically as both of these drugs are quite cheap unless someone has developed a massive tolerance.
Millipore filters would reduce the risk of bacterial infections and it is curious why these aren’t offered to “clients” of insite. The millipore filters do nothing to improve the quality of crappy drugs and someone injecting cocaine cut with levamisole will be at just as much risk of neutropenia and vasculitis.
trollbertarian seems to have bypassed the entire science question and proceeded directly to Blame Whitey.
You can’t reduce the harm of drug addiction by making a “safer place” to shoot up in. The drug is the harm, everything else that happens to these knobs is the fallout from drug damage. That’s why there’s no respectable science to support trollbertarian’s position, his position is f-ing illogical and not supported by even a casual perusal of the facts.
The only people who benefit from Insite are the sons of beeatches who draw a salary from it.
I concur with Loki, the best solution is repeal of the current regulations on drugs AND self defense. You take the cool factor out of it and make burglary/mugging/robbery a guaranteed death sentence, the drug problem will be history pretty much over night.
That’s why Big Government statists won’t do that. They worked very hard for a very long time to get things the way they are now and they make a lot of money out of it.
Insite and its supporters/apologists forget (for whatever reason) that junkies are irresponsible people to begin with. Troubled, perhaps, but definitely irresponsible. Harm reduction isn’t addressing that problem.
Osumashi, they were irresponsible dorks -before- they started the drugs. On drugs they become functionally incapable of responsibility, or forethought, or predicting the consequences of their actions, or even feeding themselves in advanced cases.
That’s why a government shooting gallery is so blisteringly stupid, it doesn’t even accomplish its stated goal of reducing harm. It helps them do -more- harm, for longer.
the programs you are talking about ARE highly effective at treating drug addiction, but you happily gloss over the fact that it is only available to a tiny fraction of addicts, and to none who don’t already have a life to build upon.
Insite is a harm-reduction measure, not a treatment facility. it is an emergency measure designed to stop addicts from dying in the streets, and to introduce those who have not seen a doctor and who can’t obtain a referral elsewhere to the possibility of quitting. these people are homeless, hurting, and many of them have multiple mental illnesses and physical problems, and ended up on the street because their problems did not fit the cookie-cutter set of problems you’re allowed to have to qualify for mental health care.
until you can provide some alternative to death and disease – and in a society where we continue to blame the marginalized for their own downfall, your suggestion that they join a detox program that costs hundreds of dollars or only has 100 openings a year for poor people sounds one he’ll of a lot like “let them eat cake.”