It might be a hard sell to use Vancouver as a model. It has an area which is perhaps the most public display of social decay I've ever encounted in a first-world city, principally from drug abuse.
There's a reason the Vancouver City Police support the safe injection site. Crime is down; incidence of AIDs transmission, Hepatitis transmission, STI transmission, down across the board.
I walk through the DTES every day between my home and work. It's ugly. It smells like urine. I walk past people shooting heroin several times a week. It's a hundred times better than it was 20 years ago. It's ugly from our perspective. It's vastly improved from the reality of junkie neighbourhoods when we refused to acknowledge how such communities work and how to help the people in them.
As for the safe injection site stuff, I lived and worked in the area around the time that place was opened.
It was a shit hole before it opened and continued to be so after it opened. I never went in the site, and never cared to. Nothing special around it. People shoot up in the streets all the time and I'd still be careful where you walk to not step on a needle and don't wear sandals ;)
But supposedly this: Rates of HIV infection dropped from 8.1 cases per 100 person-years in 1997 to 0.37 cases per 100 person-years by 2011. By 2015, the 40-block area surrounding the safe injection site had a 35% decline in overdose deaths.
The DTES in Van is a pretty interesting place. It's not as bad as it looks. I personally never had any problems in the area. But it's still a shit hole.
I'd like to see a source on that; at minimum, I suspect those numbers would be for new, not total, infections, and I've never seen HIV stats narrowed down to the block level. Plus, sexual transmissions unrelated to the injection site should have accounted for more cases than that.
The neighbourhood has vastly changed due to condo development, gentrification and government programs. The DTES was really run down a decade ago ... now it’s hipsters everywhere. Great coffee!
The population that has mental health and drug abuse issues has been pushed into a very small area in this city, largely due to past political decisions. Most of the social housing and services are primarily centralized in the DTES. Other neighbourhoods don’t want the social housing and the hard-to-house residents.
I think the drug situation was getting better, but then cheap fentanyl hit, and it’s been tough. Fentanyl is a crisis everywhere.
“Harm reduction” is the only ethical way to go, IMHO. I have friends in nursing that work at the Crosstown Clinic, where they are doing hardcore peer reviewed clinical trials involving prescription heroine, and they are genuinely saving lives and even getting hardcore junkies off drugs completely. Every other city in North America is leaving those people to die.
I’ll take Vancouver, thank you.
In all seriousness, watch The Wire. It gets you thinking and covers the topic well.
Knew someone was going to mention it :)
Now for the junkies, needs to be more than a safe haven to shoot up and definitely agree with your sentiments. I know they offer more than that, but some people just want that and that's the problem
I don't know if you've ever met a working-class person, but I think you have things the opposite way round. It tends to be the middle-class petit-bourgeois who advocate a tolerant approach to the victims of drug abuse. Working-class people despise junkies because they are on the front-line of the associated crime, decay, danger, filth, child-neglect, disease etc.
His mother works harder than any “working class person” I have ever met.
The real measure of success is how few people become junkies in the first place.
No, the real measure of success is how few peoples lives are ruined.
If a bunch of people end up addicted to heroin, but end up living fulfilling and productive lives regardless, that's a fairly good outcome. If implementing measures to reduce the number of addicts leads to the remaining ones living in poverty and overdosing, then that's not an improvement.
That doesn't happen though. Not because of existing drug policy, but because of the all consuming nature of addiction.