Needle Disposal

[ken0042]

Originally Posted by RougeUnderoos

It doesn't work. If harsher sentences and more enforcement worked, there wouldn't be a drug problem (worse than here, I'll bet) in places like Texas or California.

IIRC, part of the problem in the States is that dealers can turn on their dealer, and it's only the top of the chain that gets serious time. Meanwhile you mid-level people are looking for another source. What I'm saying is take away the middle man; with no chance for a deal for turning on somebody bigger. If there are no dealers, there will be no junkies. Get the media involved, and have them report dealers and how much time they got. Pretty soon the word will be out.

[SaskaBushFire]

There will always be a supply, if you take one dealer another will take his spot, it happens in every country. The only way to win a war against drugs is to demolish the demand.

[FlamingLonghorn]

Originally Posted by ken0042

IIRC, part of the problem in the States is that dealers can turn on their dealer, and it's only the top of the chain that gets serious time. Meanwhile you mid-level people are looking for another source. What I'm saying is take away the middle man; with no chance for a deal for turning on somebody bigger. If there are no dealers, there will be no junkies. Get the media involved, and have them report dealers and how much time they got. Pretty soon the word will be out.

Yeah it doesn't work their is too much money to be made from drugs you take one middle man down another 5 will be there in 10 secs. Seriously the US has spent probably trillions on the war on drugs and it is failing terribly...

[RougeUnderoos]

Originally Posted by kipperfan

this is just my oppinion but I am willing to fork over more tax dollars to get the lowlife drug dealing scum off the streets before they are propositioning my kids in 15 or 20 years.

I know it is a popular image that seedy drugdealers are prowling the streets offering drugs to children, but from my experience I don't believe it's the truth. Not in Calgary at least.

I can remember one or two times in my life when some stranger offered to sell me drugs and I wasn't a child and I wasn't near a school. Like a lot of us I'm sure, I grew up in the suburbs. If you wanted to buy some weed you had to go looking for it and you had to know where to look. There was never some dude hanging around the playground with an ounce of pot in his pocket offering it up to kids who weren't interested, as the "scum on the streets propositioning kids" myth suggests.

Kids and adults use drugs because they want to, not because some random guy out there offered it to them.

[JohnnyB]

Originally Posted by Bring_Back_Shantz

But to me, allowing a place for this activity to happen is only making it easier for the people doing it (They won't get busted), so who knows what impact you might be having on the overall problem?

...

The best way to reduce risk to the public is to reduce the activity itself, not to move it out of sight.

Safe injection sites are no more out of sight than more typical sites for drug use. In fact I would say it is the exact opposite. A safe injection site that is government run in a location that is publicly known to be an injection site with government employees is much more out in the open than a person's home, behind a dumpster in an alley, a toilet stall or any other hidden location that a person would normally use to take illegal drugs. If anything, having safe injection sites is a way of bringing problems with drug use out into the open so that they can be dealt with more effectively.

Also, having safe injection sites is not condoning the use of drugs, but it does provide drug users with exposure to a community of workers who can offer help in their breaking the addiction. Beyond simply reducing the threat of needles to the public, safe injection sites are a way of reaching out to drug users in order to try to help them overcome the threat of drugs in their lives. Between the dealers and private hideaways that drug users would have without safe injection sites those users would simply not have access to that support.

[GrrlGoalie33]

I believe too that the Van safe injection site was very successful. IIRC there were also conditions to using the facility that included being open to the possibility of rehabilitating yourself and talking with councellors that were onsite.

Safe injection sites are not the be-all, end-all, but they are worthwhile. The more people that use the system, the less chance we have of the spread of diseases such as HIV/AIDS and they are getting education about how to stop using. There are many addicts out there that would like to stop using, but don't know where to turn - the safe injection site offers them that information.

[SaskaBushFire]

Alright lets use Columbia as an example here. Columbia only produces approximately 13% of the worlds Cocoa leaf, yet they also produce 70-80% of the worlds Cocaine. It is without a doubt Coke Capital. There is access to two different oceans from this country, they can ship directly to Miami and Los Angeles, also up the coast to NY. The states spends billions of dollars every year trying to destroy their source and production in this country.

The cartel continues to thrive despite their best efforts. This is an example of why going at the source does not work. There are millions of people linked to this drug cartel and when one goes down, another steps in. They have the money to bribe officials, I would guess even US officials, to keep their product moving.

You have to go at the demand, the users, thats how you win. Unfortunately a working method of doing so has yet to be discovered and that is why we still have these drug problems. But, countries like the States and Canada are realising this and are shifting their focus, so we will see what the future holds.

[RedHot25]

Good post, JohnnyB.

[Bobblehead]

The "War on Drugs" hasn't worked, no many how many classrooms Nancy Reagan visited. Prison systems were jammed with drug criminals, and other violent offenders were released early to make space in the prisons.
From a CBC article before the last election (link)

In 1999, approximately 6.3 million adults-3.1 per cent the U.S. adult population-were under correctional supervision (that is, incarceration, probation, or parole). Drug offenders accounted for 21 per cent of the State prison population in 1998, up from 6 per cent in 1980. That number continues to grow, despite an overall drop in the crime rate.

This does say that the crime rate dropped, but it also dropped in Canada where we did not follow the same enforcement (link)

Since 1980, the American arrest rate for drug possession, trafficking and production has doubled, whereas the Canadian rate has declined 29%. That large increase in the United States is due to increases in arrests for drug possession. In 2000, U.S. police arrested 454 people for every 100,000 population for drug possession-over four times the rate of 100 in Canada.

So other than filling prisons, it doesn't seem like the "War on Drugs" accomplished much else. From the earlier CBC article:

A study by the Rand Corporation concluded that minimum sentencing has done little to keep illegal drugs off America's streets, and that the money spent locking up people for drug possession and trafficking would have been better spent on treating drug users.

And it costs $52,000/year to house an inmate in a provincial jail (same CBC article - federal prisons cost even more). If you take those earlier drug possession numbers and apply them to Calgary (population of 1 Million), the difference is 354 arrests (454 arrests minus the 100 arrests we presumably do now)/100,000 people/year = an additional 3540 people arrested/year. If they all went to jail for one year, that is $52,000 x 3540 = $184,080,000
$184 million more dollars, just to house them in prison, not to mention court costs. And that is just Calgary.

The "War on Crime" hasn't worked and it costs a huge amount of money.

There must be a better way. Will needle exchanges make things worse? I doubt it would cost more.

[Winsor_Pilates]

Make it all legal and regulate it. Eliminate drug dealers by eliminating their illegal industry.