It's a terrible idea, but then, this is Seattle, the far-left freakazoid enclave on Puget Sound.
At LAT, "
Seattle's new war on drugs: Giving heroin addicts 'safe sites' to shoot up":
Seattle officials are moving forward with a controversial plan for what would be the nation’s first supervised heroin-injection clinics — government-financed shooting galleries that supporters say can save lives but that critics say will only enable drug users.
A new 99-page task force study envisions at least two safe-use facilities — one in Seattle, another in the suburbs — where heroin addicts can legally take narcotics while being monitored by medical personnel who can administer aid or call 911 if needed.
The project is modeled after North America’s first supervised heroin haven, InSite, a government-funded injection facility 140 miles north in Vancouver, B.C., which in 13 years of operation has never had an overdose fatality, officials there say.
That success has inspired other cities — including San Francisco, Los Angeles and Portland — to consider government-approved safe sites for addicts to inject heroin. But Seattle is moving fastest, convinced there is “urgent need for action,” as the new study puts it.
“For me personally, what has worked,” says Seattle social worker Thea Oliphant-Wells, a task force member and recovering heroin addict for 11 years, “was to have harm-reduction folks engaging me long before I was ready to change my drug-abuse behavior. I promise you, when you give people the opportunity to get better, they will.”
Jeff Duchin, head of Seattle-King County Public Health, said the safe sites — officially known as Community Health Engagement Locations — will increase the odds for drug users to return to healthy lives by reducing overdoses, preventing HIV and other infections and cutting down on other drug-related medical problems.
The proposal has the support of King County’s chief executive and the mayor of Seattle, a city once dubbed by Rolling Stone as “Junkie Town.” Heroin use here and across the U.S. dripped, then spiked in the last decade as Americans addicted to pain killers such as OxyContin and Percocet looked to the streets for cheaper alternatives.
A United Nations study released this summer found that use of heroin has soared in the last two decades. U.S. deaths related to the narcotic have increased fivefold since 2000 and the number of U.S. users has tripled to one million in that time.
In King County, with good Samaritan laws that prevent prosecution of anyone who, in good faith, aids an overdose victim, and with wider use of the recovery drug Naloxone by first responders, overdose deaths actually dropped last year — 132, compared with 156 in 2014.
But from 2010 to 2014, the number of users seeking treatment here doubled from 1,439 to 2,886, and the death toll in 2015 was a third higher than two years ago.
With no apparent end to the upward trend, local officials say safe-use sites are a worthy intervention...
Sorry. I'm not convinced giving addicts a government-sponsored heroin safe space is the path to creating drug-free lives. The article needed to cite addiction experts who provide evidence why this isn't a great idea. It's still experimental at this point. My hunch is that enabling addicts to shoot up only legitimizes hardcore drug dependency. If you want to help people, get them into treatment. Drug use will continue to spike as long as government-financed bleeding-heart leftists enable drug addicts to get high.
