Fairy Tales in Crack Houses

I never read Cinderella or the Little Match Girl to my daughter or my sons. I instinctively steered away from fairy tales where the main character through no fault of their own gets dealt a raw deal by life but not to fret because at the 11th hour someone will intervene and they all will live happily ever after. Life is just not like that. As it is written, the rain falls on the just and the unjust and that about sums it up. No one gets a free pass for a trouble free life.

More importantly, I didn’t want my children to live out their lives as a victim; wallowing in defeat and distress while waiting patiently for a knight in shining armor to show up to save them from misfortune or folly. I wanted them to grow up to be the heroes of their own lives.

All of which means that I am seriously out of sync with the times I live in. Today, every one is a victim in constant need of being saved from misfortune, discrimination or the outright folly of our own devising. This is not the Age of Chivalry and there are no knights in shining armor riding to the rescue but the call goes out regularly for the government to fund some program or designate some group “victims” in order to spare them the logical consequences of their own choices.

Case in point; read Rosie Dimanno’s recent column in the Toronto Star (registration required) on the current report issued by Toronto Drug Strategy Advisory Committee:

So let me get this straight: I can't smoke cigarettes in Toronto but I can smoke crack? The former is a public health risk, nipped in the butt at nearly every indoor venue, with bossy and vilifying interdiction campaigns that have transformed smokers into social pariahs. But the latter is a personal choice that ought not to be stigmatized by a judgmental society.

I am not making this up. I am merely taking to their presumptive conclusions some of the recommendations advanced in a drug strategy scheme unveiled at city hall on Friday. So very non-condemnatory of drug use is the report by the Toronto Drug Strategy Advisory Committee that its members have quite deliberately eschewed even the term "drug abuse'' as inherently pejorative. The word "abuse,'' the report states upfront, "perpetuates social stigma and judgment which can marginalize and alienate people from the very supports they need."

These supports could, come the day, include "supervised injection sites or inhalation rooms'' in Toronto — inhalation rooms because crack cocaine is the most frequently used street drug in this city — as posited by Recommendation No. 55. That recommendation does not overtly call for the establishment of such 100 per cent toleration zones. It merely asks the city, in partnership with the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health and community groups, to further study that option in developing strategies to address the "stigma and discrimination toward people who use substances.''

The report's authors do acknowledge that supervised consumption sites — a 50-cent euphemism for what most of us would call a crack house — would provoke tremendous controversy, as indeed the matter did, does, within the committee's own membership. Clearly, there was not enough agreement from within its ranks to make a bold, unambiguous proposal. But it's just as clear, from reading this section, that the committee wants to venture further in the direction of what I can only describe as legal crack arcades, which can only be created, in this country, after obtaining formal exclusion under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. It's been done already in some 50 jurisdictions around the world, and, as of this past July, in Vancouver, where the issue is heroin rather than crack.

Read the whole thing. I’ll wait. Now who do you think will fund and pay the salaries of those who supervise the consumption sites? Once the sites are up and running how long before the calls goes out for these establishments to provide quality controlled crack? How many more social workers, nurses and community aid workers will be needed to man these sites? Think of the workers compensation claims. If that isn’t bad enough, imagine the consumption sites are located next door to your home because dollars to donuts some poor sods will have the misfortune to be living right beside where city hall will mandate there be a safe consumption house. And it won't cause drug addiction levels to decline even one small whit.

Update:

We are even further down the road to perdition than I originally thought. Taken from the Toronto Star (registration required).

Crack cocaine is the most frequently used street drug, he said, and "we're not doing enough" about it, McKeown said. "Crack kits — which are being distributed in Toronto now — are seen as a way to reach out and pull in a very marginalized group of drug users," McKeown said. The kits contain clean mouthpieces, pipe stems and screens. "You can't get people into treatment, you can't reach people with prevention messages and harm reduction interventions if you can't talk to them directly. So the crack kits are seen as a good way to do that." The kits might also limit the spread of disease from one user to another, he said, but there's not enough evidence yet to draw conclusions.

Crack kits, what can I say? Now we know what our property taxes are purchasing. If I remember the jargon correctly from my college classes in the psychology of addiction - wouldn’t this render us as “enablers”?