For years, the liberal left has been trying to defend their hardcore drug abusers as people who are misunderstood, or that we just need to take care of them and get them into treatment programs. A vision of treatment programs, housing, and testing to prevent overdoses would make it safer for these addicts as well as the communities around them.
While that sounds good on the surface, if you’ve ever actually been around real addicts, you’ll know that this was a horrible idea from the get-go.
A safe room for users in Melbourne has been described as a “honey pot for users” after its creation. Per stats released by the Victorian opposition, the number of use syringes they have picked up each month has gone from 1200 to 18,000. With a bill to make the site permanent, both sides have been very vocal about the impending ruling.
The Liberal and National Party both want to see changes before this is made a full fixture of the neighborhood. Located in the inner-city suburb of North Richmond, it is located next to a primary school and community health complex. This location is in clear defiance of the requirement that it be at least 250m from a primary school, which has largely been ignored.
Opposition health spokeswoman Georgie Crozier talked of residents in the neighborhood who are in staunch opposition to this site remaining open. In one instance Crozier recalled how the lady was forced to barricade herself inside her own home with people shooting up on her front stoop. This elderly resident is in fear daily.
Given the number of syringes she finds in her yard daily, nobody could blame her. A photo released on May 3rd that shows a heavily intoxicated man with a syringe in his hand as he curls up on his back has been plastered across social media. Shot in the vicinity of the safe shoot site, it is a sign of just how deep the addiction in the area has become and just how damaging it is to the community. By putting a blurred-out face to this scourge, many hope it will lead to the elimination of these rooms.
Despite years’ worth of warnings from Vancouver in Canada, Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and our own failed small experiments in San Francisco, Australians pressed forward in the name of the liberal message being spread across the country. Oh how wrong they were to think they would be different.
Now, as they get ready to keep or eliminate this program, the upsides of saving lives by preventing overdoes and potential drug interactions are huge. However, the lack of achievements in slowing down the progression of addiction across the country has gone down significantly.
Instead, more and more people are willing to roll the dice and experiment with harder drugs because of these safe rooms. If the risk of death goes down, the willingness to accept the minimalized risk goes up. This has not only created more addicts, but it has also encouraged the amateur chemists who are already doctoring many of these drugs to try newer and more dangerous blends to achieve longer or harder highs with less cost.
As the US is already dealing with their own fentanyl and heroin epidemics many have been pushing the idea of expanding the safe house programs across the US. Given all the evidence that these safe sites only contaminate the community they are in, there have been proposals to keep them in drug-infested neighborhoods. However, given the propensity of the wealthy to overlook these problems, many have been trying to lure them into nicer areas. They believe that if successful they can get those with deep pockets to help combat the addiction, and not just ignore it.
Addiction is something the globe will likely deal with until the end of time. As human beings, everyone has their vices and we have a limited number of choices on how we deal with them. Ignoring them is not an option and neither is outright acceptance of addiction. Yet that’s all these clinics do; hide it from most of society, and force the poor to accept their fate as they watch it happen.
