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As an aside, an early safe injection site was a home for addicts in Massachusetts detailed in Drug Crazy by Mike Gray that was only shut down against the better judgement of the local police after the prohibition against heroin was first brought into effect. The addicts were no problem to anyone, and the long term effects of addiction was minimal due to clean drugs, proper housing, good food, and an opportunity to work like other people.
Peter Cohen is a Dutch sociologist studying drug addicts and his take is that what we call drug addicts are people who fall in love with a substance. His view: as with romantic love, trying to separate lovers leads to horrible problems. His prescription: give the people free access to their love and let them work it out.
For 100 years we have been trying to help addicts live a better life free of their drugs. For 100 years we have been failing miserably: there are ever more addicts and the bad effects of their drugs have been magnified. There is no evidence that drug abuse has been reduced in frequency or that drug takers take less drugs than they otherwise would. On the contrary, the prohibitionist countries the highest rates of drug abuse and drug-related social harm in the world.
A fundamental principle of our democracy is that you trust individuals to look out for their own best interests and then you leave them alone. Yes, that means that other people may make what you consider to be a mistake, but those mistakes are less frequent and more easily dealt with than the mistakes that are hidden in our system.
While we would like to believe that we are better than drug addicts and therefore more capable at setting boundaries on their behavior, most of the trouble we suffer as a result of drug addiction is really the trouble we create by our paternalistic do-gooderism, such as drug overdoses, diseases from bad drug delivery mechanisms, property crime by addicts trying to pay prices inflated by prohibition, and the crime and corruption of co-existing with a multi-billion dollar illegal industry.
Hopefully the day will come when we remember what democracy is all about: not about running another man's life, but letting him run it for himself.
And we're not talking in pretty impractical theories: there is no way to run another man's life without ruining it.
