Who's saved by safe shooting?

Considering the "informed choices" a "participant" awaiting a "safe" injection of heroin is likely to make, such jargon is not only peculiar, it is sanitized to the point of fantasy. Indeed, it is disconcerting to realize that the only educating "safe injection sites" set out to do concerns the unhealthiness of unsanitary drug use, which often leads to HIV infection, and not the unhealthiness of drug use in the first place.

Lori-Kim Veenstra, the addict with "good blood flow," says nobody in the center "pushes" treatment information on her; indeed, the only signs on the clinic walls mentioned in the Post article read: "No nurse, no fix." And: "If you are not injecting or using the bathroom, stay out." Zettel, who says she wants to come across as being "nonjudgmental," explains the "safe" site philosophy this way: "I can't push my agenda. If Lori is interested in detox treatment, it is about what Veenstra wants when she wants it." The article ends with Veenstra wanting another fix.

While a few pesky kinks in Canada's new policy remain -- addicts, for example, continue to risk arrest by buying the illegal drugs they bring to "safe" sites, which operate as drug-arrest-free zones -- harm reduction proponents would likely see in Veenstra's case evidence of "safe injection site" success. John Walters, White House drug policy director, would disagree. "The very name is a lie," he told the Post. "It can't be made safe. We believe the only moral responsibility is to treat drug users. It is reprehensible to allow people and encourage people to continue suffering."

I must say it seems doubly reprehensible for medical professionals to allow and encourage people to continue suffering. "It's the most ethical work I've ever done as a nurse and a human being," says Ms. Zettel. "We as a society have reinforced their (addicts') marginalization. They have a poor sense of self-esteem and value. We have reinforced that. That to me is criminal."

So much for being nonjudgmental. Meanwhile, how it is that injection sites, which would seem to promise only to keep addicts addicted, can possibly undo anyone's "marginalization" is a mystery.

As for "self-esteem" -- "self-respect" would be a healthier aim -- it's hard to see how shooting up, however safely, can ever help.