The Globe and Mail's Series on Drug Abuse: Part 2

Margaret Wente's second column on Vancouver's drug addiction problem appeared today. This one focuses on the heavily biased "research" that supports Insite and other government funded organizations. Here's an interesting snippet about all of the "research" that has been done:

Garth Davies teaches research methodology at Simon Fraser University's school of criminology. He recently published an evaluation of all the research literature on safe-injection facilities, including Insite. He wasn't impressed. "[They] are too often credited with generating positive effects that are not borne out by solid empirical evidence," he wrote. "As a result of methodological and analytical problems ... all claims remain open to question."

In other words, just like a corrupt casino in Vegas, the fix was in with this "research" before it ever started. Those doing the "research" know what results they want and strangely enough, they get the data that supports their own bias ... and keeps on funding their initiatives too.

So many of the people involved with Insite et al are nothing more than con men running a back alley shell game. Yet they've convinced enough suckers that keeping the lives of poor drug addicts extended in the same miserable state is the best we can do. Here's one such sucker. He cites the presence of The Four Pillars: Harm Reduction, Treatment, Prevention, and Enforcement. The writer is either willfully ignorant or outright lying. For as David Berner has frequently and accurately said, what we actually have is one pillar and 3 matchsticks.

I know we can do better. It likely means forcibly incarcerating drug addicts - not in a jail, but in a proper medical treatment facility, thousands of kilometres away from the Downtown Eastside. But watch the outcry if that were ever to happen. You'll hear cries of "human rights violations". When they occur though, ask yourself whether these people really care about the welfare and future of the drug addicts or are more concerned about the funding and full employment of the social programs in place now. Follow the money, kids, always follow the money!