>“You can care deeply about people battling addiction and still believe that communities deserve to be safe,” said Mr. Ellis, who was joined by Rick Wilson, Minister of Mental Health and Addiction. “Our government refuses to pretend that one must come at the expense of the other.”
>Mr. Wilson said the province has no plans to close Alberta’s remaining sites in Edmonton and Grande Prairie. He noted the capital accounts for about 60 per cent of drug-related deaths in Alberta and “we need better insight into exactly what is happening.” More than 600 people died in Edmonton last year.
gihkal on
Just start using DMT and ibogaine already. Injection sites haven’t been shown to help addicts get clean or prevent new users.
The only thing they do is lessen demand from our healthcare system and even that is becoming untrue with the ambulances that are held up at these centers constantly.
differing on
I was an early supporter of safe consumption sites, but I’m becoming more and more sympathetic to the critics, largely because of the failure of those that advocate for them to empathize with the concerns of people who aren’t on drugs.
I think that there’s been a lot of scope creep in many of these sites that doesn’t match the social contract that moderates signed on to. Many sites have staff that now argue strongly that pushing opioid agonist therapy (e.g., replacing fentanyl with legal prescribed drugs) isn’t beneficial for some clients. That may be so, but we were all originally sold on the idea that these would be centres to transition folks off of heroin while keeping them alive- abandoning that expectation feels like a bait and switch.
Further, harm reduction advocates have a bad habit of gaslighting people about the harms these centres do to the areas they exist in. Having crowds of loitering drug users is awful and instead of acknowledging this, folks call these reasonable concerns NIMBY’ism. Even more bizarrely, proposing that these crowds already existed and these centres somehow just appeared out of the ether in the midst of a street corner full of folded over homeless people. You’ll see this absurdity laid bare in the wake of their closure- we were told that drug users aren’t loitering in these areas, yet now that they’re closed, we’re told that having people passed out in our public transit for hours is because they couldn’t hang around the safe consumption site all day.
I still think they’re often a net good, especially for an area like Vancouver’s DTES that is otherwise filled with people dropping dead, but advocates need to do a better job making their case to other residents that don’t smoke down. It’s also important to acknowledge that most of the drama with these sites could be reduced by simply getting people housing.
FlyingRock20 on
Supervised drug sites were never the answer. Need to do real treatment centers to help people not just keep giving them drugs. Like it was a half ass idea in the first place. Just spend the money and help people. Start legalizing some more less dangerous drugs and use the tax money to fund drug centers.
Sandman64can on
The only drug consumption site they want is gonna be the Sky Palace.
Silver_BackYWG on
They fail in every province
Saisinko on
Started getting homeless/junkies in my neighborhood. Raised an eyebrow, but didn’t devote much thought to it.
5am I get a notification on my phone of my security camera triggering. Sure enough some junkie snooping around the property, looking into vehicles, and into a back garage. Confront him, Fu Fu fu, you know the usual male vocabulary for dirty talk and telling someone off. Towards the end he’s like I hope your family is inside when I burn down your house, then speeds off on what might as well have been a little girl’s tricycle.
Call up the cops and they don’t care whatsoever until I mentioned the threat, which was also caught on camera, and they’re like holy F we’ll be right over – I assume they’re just worried about optics and being liable.
Anywayssss a few weeks later I head up to a local pharmacy and I notice a bunch of junkies lined up nearby. Sure enough, there’s some sort of government drug site that’s new to the area so 1+1. Lots of garbage around it, needles on the ground, the works. More recently, I had a homeless person setup camp in a wooded area of my property…
I’m born and raised in BC and it’s surreal to see the rapid decline of multiple areas I grew up in and how I’m against the thought of raising children in them.
s1iver on
Figured there’s bars in Alaberta, that’s also a supervised consumption site…
abc123DohRayMe on
As a society we should not do anything that supports drug users in any way. We need to take a moral stand. They have always been and aways will be those people who make wrong and self-harmful decions. This is just human nature. All the supports to drug users in the world will never change this, and it seems to me that these supports only make it easier to be an addict.
I do not wish harm on anyone, and that includes helping addicts to keep harming themselves.
When someone has reached the point that they want to stop being an addict, then we should help. But until then we should not be helping to be an addict.
Sadly I know that some people may never change and will be lost souls. I pray for them.
But if we concentrate our efforts on helping those out of addiction then we will do more good in the long term.
NovoRobot on
Tax payers should always be prioritized over homeless drug addicts.
VentureCatalyst00 on
Most addicts don’t want to get clean, that’s the sad reality.
You don’t find yourself in and out of ambulances and ER’s for the same self inflicted thing unless you’ve pretty much lost all shame and consideration for those around you.
You can start charging them for emergency services, they won’t pay it. Debt means nothing to them.
Our downtowns will continue to look like The Walking Dead and our Healthcare system will continue to deal with this burden until we start discussing real solutions here..
If you’re found doing drugs on the street, you should be rounded up, taken to a facility which serves as a detox centre where there will also be counselling services and zero access to any drugs. Anyone admitted must stay for 1 year minimum.
bigbosfrog on
The challenge with the argument that we can’t close these facilities because people will die, is that perpetual drug addiction like these people face is a fate worse than death.
The harsh reality is you are better accelerating what would otherwise be an inevitable death in a few more people, if through not enabling addiction you were able to coax more people out of it.
13 Comments
>“You can care deeply about people battling addiction and still believe that communities deserve to be safe,” said Mr. Ellis, who was joined by Rick Wilson, Minister of Mental Health and Addiction. “Our government refuses to pretend that one must come at the expense of the other.”
>Mr. Wilson said the province has no plans to close Alberta’s remaining sites in Edmonton and Grande Prairie. He noted the capital accounts for about 60 per cent of drug-related deaths in Alberta and “we need better insight into exactly what is happening.” More than 600 people died in Edmonton last year.
Just start using DMT and ibogaine already. Injection sites haven’t been shown to help addicts get clean or prevent new users.
The only thing they do is lessen demand from our healthcare system and even that is becoming untrue with the ambulances that are held up at these centers constantly.
I was an early supporter of safe consumption sites, but I’m becoming more and more sympathetic to the critics, largely because of the failure of those that advocate for them to empathize with the concerns of people who aren’t on drugs.
I think that there’s been a lot of scope creep in many of these sites that doesn’t match the social contract that moderates signed on to. Many sites have staff that now argue strongly that pushing opioid agonist therapy (e.g., replacing fentanyl with legal prescribed drugs) isn’t beneficial for some clients. That may be so, but we were all originally sold on the idea that these would be centres to transition folks off of heroin while keeping them alive- abandoning that expectation feels like a bait and switch.
Further, harm reduction advocates have a bad habit of gaslighting people about the harms these centres do to the areas they exist in. Having crowds of loitering drug users is awful and instead of acknowledging this, folks call these reasonable concerns NIMBY’ism. Even more bizarrely, proposing that these crowds already existed and these centres somehow just appeared out of the ether in the midst of a street corner full of folded over homeless people. You’ll see this absurdity laid bare in the wake of their closure- we were told that drug users aren’t loitering in these areas, yet now that they’re closed, we’re told that having people passed out in our public transit for hours is because they couldn’t hang around the safe consumption site all day.
I still think they’re often a net good, especially for an area like Vancouver’s DTES that is otherwise filled with people dropping dead, but advocates need to do a better job making their case to other residents that don’t smoke down. It’s also important to acknowledge that most of the drama with these sites could be reduced by simply getting people housing.
Supervised drug sites were never the answer. Need to do real treatment centers to help people not just keep giving them drugs. Like it was a half ass idea in the first place. Just spend the money and help people. Start legalizing some more less dangerous drugs and use the tax money to fund drug centers.
The only drug consumption site they want is gonna be the Sky Palace.
They fail in every province
Started getting homeless/junkies in my neighborhood. Raised an eyebrow, but didn’t devote much thought to it.
5am I get a notification on my phone of my security camera triggering. Sure enough some junkie snooping around the property, looking into vehicles, and into a back garage. Confront him, Fu Fu fu, you know the usual male vocabulary for dirty talk and telling someone off. Towards the end he’s like I hope your family is inside when I burn down your house, then speeds off on what might as well have been a little girl’s tricycle.
Call up the cops and they don’t care whatsoever until I mentioned the threat, which was also caught on camera, and they’re like holy F we’ll be right over – I assume they’re just worried about optics and being liable.
Anywayssss a few weeks later I head up to a local pharmacy and I notice a bunch of junkies lined up nearby. Sure enough, there’s some sort of government drug site that’s new to the area so 1+1. Lots of garbage around it, needles on the ground, the works. More recently, I had a homeless person setup camp in a wooded area of my property…
I’m born and raised in BC and it’s surreal to see the rapid decline of multiple areas I grew up in and how I’m against the thought of raising children in them.
Figured there’s bars in Alaberta, that’s also a supervised consumption site…
As a society we should not do anything that supports drug users in any way. We need to take a moral stand. They have always been and aways will be those people who make wrong and self-harmful decions. This is just human nature. All the supports to drug users in the world will never change this, and it seems to me that these supports only make it easier to be an addict.
I do not wish harm on anyone, and that includes helping addicts to keep harming themselves.
When someone has reached the point that they want to stop being an addict, then we should help. But until then we should not be helping to be an addict.
Sadly I know that some people may never change and will be lost souls. I pray for them.
But if we concentrate our efforts on helping those out of addiction then we will do more good in the long term.
Tax payers should always be prioritized over homeless drug addicts.
Most addicts don’t want to get clean, that’s the sad reality.
You don’t find yourself in and out of ambulances and ER’s for the same self inflicted thing unless you’ve pretty much lost all shame and consideration for those around you.
You can start charging them for emergency services, they won’t pay it. Debt means nothing to them.
Our downtowns will continue to look like The Walking Dead and our Healthcare system will continue to deal with this burden until we start discussing real solutions here..
If you’re found doing drugs on the street, you should be rounded up, taken to a facility which serves as a detox centre where there will also be counselling services and zero access to any drugs. Anyone admitted must stay for 1 year minimum.
The challenge with the argument that we can’t close these facilities because people will die, is that perpetual drug addiction like these people face is a fate worse than death.
The harsh reality is you are better accelerating what would otherwise be an inevitable death in a few more people, if through not enabling addiction you were able to coax more people out of it.
You can’t help people who can’t help themselves.