admin @ Fri, 2006-09-08 11:00
The emotional controversy surrounding Insite, North America's only supervised injection site, has pretty well quashed any rational and informed dialogue on legal injection sites.
As in the cases of same-sex marriage, government-run daycare and Wal-Mart, one's political and philosophical convictions tend to conscript them into one camp or the other on hot-button issues.
It's important to recall how much political capital has been invested in the injection site. The election that saw Larry Campbell and COPE take over Vancouver City Hall was very much a plebiscite on establishing such a facility. For many players, Insite "must" succeed.
The tobacco companies have never had difficulty finding research firms or academics to write reports confirming the harmlessness of second-hand smoke.
Normally, academics are overly cautious when interpreting data. They tend to resist announcing firm conclusions and typically urge further research. But such healthy skepticism is in short supply regarding the preliminary inquiry conducted on Insite.
Anyone with a research background should know that the facility has not been in operation long enough to be qualified an outright success or failure. The evaluative research is at a preliminary and speculative stage at best.
Other scholars are claiming that because something similar is doing well in Switzerland we should open up a string of injection sites in B.C., as though we were talking about expanding a fast- food schnitzel franchise.
It was to be part of a larger strategy to reduce the numbers of drug users. But the research thus far is unable to document how many people, if any, have stopped using intravenous drugs as a partial consequence of Insite.
Nothing new here. Supporters of the long-gun registry insisted it saved lives despite lacking a single piece of evidence that it prevented even one homicide.
This is cache, read story here