Municipal Help-an-Addict Initiatives

It's truly a tragedy that some people find their lives so injuriously burdensome that they seek to lift the gloom of misery by finding comfort in mind-altering drugs. And, inevitably, become addicted. And, having done so discover belatedly that they are trapped in a vicious syndrome of dependency and incapacity.

Becoming alienated from family, friends, work or school habits, and society at large.

They join the unfortunate flotsam and jetsam of individuals whose drug dependency has benighted their futures. Alcohol or psychotropic drugs, whatever their choice of personal destruction, they become faint shadows of their potentials as integrated, well-adjusted members of society.

They become frail, unwholesome burdens on society. Their self-respect plummeting into self-loathing, they turn to criminal acts to feed their voraciously self-destructive habit.

So how is it particularly useful to society and helpful to these poor societal derelicts to assist their drug dependency, rather than initiate meaningful programs to address their habit?

Safe-injection sites and free needles may assist in ensuring that HIV-positive people, sharing needles with others will not pass their infection on, but does it help addicts to find their way out of their ongoing misery?

Theft and prostitution practised by individuals who have plumbed the depths of pain and despair lead to the utter degradation of the human being. They're prime targets for physical and social abuse, they're despised offal in many circles, and pitiful carrion in others.

While well meaning but shallow reasoning authorities apply the patchwork band-aid of free needles hand-outs.

Infuriating the public and particularly those families situated in areas most vulnerable to the presence of drug users, by the fact that needles are found discarded everywhere in their neighbourhoods.

Does it make any kind of good sense for a "needle exchange program" to hand out hypodermic needles without the expectation that used hypodermics will be handed back?

The City of Ottawa now hands out roughly 300,000 hypodermic needles each year to area drug addicts to ensure that they will not be used repeatedly among the three to five thousand addicts, spreading HIV and hepatitis infections.

The municipality is now looking at a cost of a quarter-of-a-million dollars to effectively clean up discarded syringes.

Why not take that amount, add to it, devise and mount a responsible program to ameliorate the problem of addiction, to rehabilitate these people, to turn their lives around, to return them to society, instead of acting as drug-use enablers?