Safe Injection Sites offer addicts “safe” place to shoot up

[Syriusly]

Nothing “Safe” About Safe Injection Sites

New York City mayor Bill de Blasio has announced support for a plan to create “safe injection sites,” where addicts can take illegal street drugs with legal sanction in a medically managed environment. Such sites have been used so far only outside the United States. In New York City, deaths by overdose are four times those from homicide. De Blasio, looking to raise his profile, perhaps in pursuit of higher office, views “safe” sites as an important tool in the battle against a nationwide epidemic of opioid abuse. Emergency-room visits for opioid overdoses rose 30 percent across the U.S. from July 2016 to September 2017, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 16 states, overdoses rose by 54 percent in large cities.

Advocates argue that safe injection sites offer proactive treatment options for addicts who come to shoot up. But there is “virtually no evidence that (safe injection sites) lead people into treatment,” notes Massachusetts governor Charlie Baker, who opposes them. Vermont, which wants to set up sites, was lambasted by its own U.S. attorney for its ambition to do so. “It is a crime, not only to use illicit narcotics, but to manage and maintain sites on which such drugs are used and distributed,” noted the federal prosecutor’s office in a December 2017 open letter.

The worst potential consequence is the normalization of serious drug use in the name of harm reduction. Safe injection sites are essentially state-sponsored shooting-up galleries. No limits have been defined for who can use them, or how often. If a teenager decides that he wants to experiment with black tar heroin, should the injection site be opened to him? Should nurses accompany users who arrive at the sites to take lethal quantities of fentanyl, with naloxone inhalers ready at hand to revive them? How many overdoses will addicts be permitted per day? How many additional police officers will be detailed to the neighborhood around the legal injection site to deal with drug sales, or with drug robberies of eager addicts heading to the sites to use?

We have some evidence of what these sites look like in practice and the effect they create. David Carson, a local politician from Redmond, Washington, went to Vancouver to visit one of the sites touted as a major success by advocates. Instead, he saw lives and a whole neighborhood being destroyed. “It looked like a war zone. There were drug-addled, glassy-eyed people strewn about,” Carson noted. “One man was lying shoeless and lifeless on his side on the cold sidewalk; I honestly couldn’t tell if he was alive or not; I couldn’t bear to take a picture of him.”

Opioids have ravaged families and devastated communities across the country. Encouraging their open use undermines the rule of law and will do nothing to quell their continued abuse, let alone the problems underlying mass addiction. Mayor de Blasio deserves credit for his focus on this scourge, but legal injection sites are not the answer. In fact, they will only worsen the crisis.

Because of course- everything is working just fine without safe injection sites.
Perhaps instead we can deal with facts?
How Europe’s heroin capital solved its overdose crisis

Goulao’s revolutionary recommendation for Portugal was to remove the criminal penalties for all drug use — in other words, decriminalization. It would be combined with an intense focus on harm reduction, treatment and rehabilitation.

A decade later, the number of addicts was halved and overdose deaths had dropped to just 30 a year for the entire country. The number has remained steady ever since.

Europe’s drug-monitoring agency says Portugal’s mortality rate from drugs is now more than four times lower than the European average.

Goulao says 90 per cent of public money spent fighting drugs in Portugal is channeled toward those health-care goals — just 10 per cent is spent on police enforcement.

 

[Syriusly]

Liberals want everyone to carry narcan for the benefit of junkies.

If I had it, i wouldn't use it.

Of course you wouldn't.

You would never do anything to help another human being.

 

[Syriusly]

This is insanity! There is no good reason to keep addicts sick. I’ve been there—living with an addiction is no way to live, but it takes sobriety to realize this and if we’re offering places to get high we’re just giving them one more reason to not get better; one more reason for them to say no to a potentially happy and fulfilling life.

How many will die of overdoses, and how many will sicken from diseases caught from dirty needles- just so you will feel good about your own recovery?

 

[fncceo]

This has been a safe-space for addicts to shoot up for over a century.

 

[C_Clayton_Jones]

I've never heard of safe injection sites before seeing this thread.

So, I will refrain from commenting on whether or not I believe they are a good idea until I do some research.

If we all did that, this could be a good discussion.

And that’s not going to happen because the thread premise is about vilifying de Blasio, not addressing the problem in good faith absent partisanism.

 

[JOSweetHeart]

I've never heard of safe injection sites before seeing this thread.

So, I will refrain from commenting on whether or not I believe they are a good idea until I do some research.

If we all did that, this could be a good discussion.

This is the first that I have heard of it too. Now that I know that such things are out there, I only have this to say: I thought the goal was to eradicate an addiction, not stimulate it.

God bless you always!!!

Holly

 

[EvilCat Breath]

Liberals want everyone to carry narcan for the benefit of junkies.

If I had it, i wouldn't use it.

Of course you wouldn't.

You would never do anything to help another human being.

Ohhh you remember that I said that. I would not help a human being if they were bleeding to death and I had the last band aid in the world.

Of course if it were an animal, i would do all that I could to help.

 

[miketx]

It seems to me the better option would be to offer free rehabilitation treatment to addicts.

What the hell are you taking about? Nothing is free!

 

[EvilCat Breath]

The best option is to let them die and bonfire the remains in a mass pit.