When you hear that your government is helping addicts shoot up or smoke crack, it’s normal to wonder: how can this possibly be good? I had the same response when I learned of Insite, Vancouver’s government funded supervised injection site. Insite describes itself as “a safe, health focused place where people inject drugs and connect to health-care services.”
The health services bit is fine, but shooting up?
With the direct aid of government? That just seems wrong. A lot of people think so, including the Harper Conservatives, who are bent on shutting the place down.
Until recently, Alberta Health Services did similar work, distributing free, clean crack pipes to Calgary addicts through the Safeworks Harm Reduction Program. But when local media publicized the existence of the pipe arrangement last month, things went sideways. Outraged commentators called on the province to stop enabling druggies. Do the right thing and shut ‘er down, they said. With remarkable swiftness, the province did just that, citing legal concerns over the arrangement.
Despite appearances, however, this is no moral victory. Although the crack pipe program and Insite might seem wildly misguided, harm reduction programs have been proven to reduce the risk of deadly infections. This is why many health organizations, including the World Health Organization, advocate for harm reduction. Smoking Richmond cigarettes with a clean crack pipe is better than using broken glass stained with somebody else’s blood.
It makes crude financial sense, too. Better to spend pocket change on disease prevention rather than tens of thousands treating HIV.
I didn’t fully grasp the concept of harm reduction until I read an essay by Meera Bai, a University of Calgary nursing grad who worked at Insite.
She described how Insite has prevented deaths and helped addicts get into treatment. Numerous studies have shown this is so, and this alone should justify its existence. But the real eye-opener was the atmosphere she described, a place of care and compassion, a haven where wounds are dressed and feet are washed.
“Constant humiliation makes the people I work with especially vulnerable, and vulnerable in almost every way: to violence, to exploitation, to false hope and finally to despair,” she wrote. “When allowed into these dark places, it is my privilege, and that of all Insite staff, to communicate worth and love instead of judgment and scorn.”
Conservative MP Joy Smith has reportedly said of Insite’s work: “There’s no way that I can support that as a human being.” After reading Bai’s words, it’s easy to see that Smith and the rest of her party have got it backwards. As a human being, how can anybody not support Insite?
This is what the Harper government is trying to end on Vancouver’s downtown eastside. And this is the kind of care that some desperate people in Calgary will now lose.
There may be a legitimate reason for scrapping the crack pipe program. If it isn’t preventing diseases, isn’t saving lives, isn’t of any real benefit to the people that are using it, then by all means, present the evidence and scratch the program.
But Alberta Health Services hasn’t indicated that any of this is the case. It looks like the province simply caved under media pressure. Certain voices yelled “BAD! BAD! BAD!” over and over again, and eventually, AHS dutifully changed course.
This will placate those who believe addicts are the sole authors of their own misery, less than human, unworthy of even a cheap glass pipe worth less than a couple quarters. But the province should be looking elsewhere for guidance, basing decisions on sound policy rather than listening to whoever yells the loudest.
Smoking crack is destructive. That’s a given. And taking away a small program that offers some measure of protection to vulnerable people on our city’s streets? That’s destructive too, even though it’s less obvious.
Tags: crack pipes, richmond cigarettes