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Drug Injection Sites

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#43
ptg said:
Hopefully you got the gist!
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I did not. I know Metallica, but I did not get your the point of your allusion:

"First of all I am a little concerned when someone who works for the police department is a harvester of sorrow!"

Sounds like you're taking a shot at a cop who was merely offering reportage from the street.
 
#45
Common Tater said:
Nothing lives in a vacuum. These drug use sites are the alternative to something. Think about what that something is, and how that impacts society.
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I lived on the same block as the unofficial alternative. It was bad, really bad.

I really don't have an answer. I don't think there is one answer.

Mental health facilities would help. Those generally got shut down in the early 1980s, dumping a bunch of people who weren't capable of fending for themselves onto the streets. I have a lot of sympathy for those kinds of people. There's one guy like that who I see on a regular basis. He seems like he's doing OK, but who really knows. He's obviously got some screws loose in a harmless way. People like him should have help directed their way.

Then there's a couple who have been begging in front of the supermarket for several years now. I don't know if they are addicts or not, but they certainly have had time to pull themselves up by now. Especially in this economy. They don't act like they have any impairments that would prevent them from leading productive lives. They just choose not to. I have absolutely no sympathy for them. But whatever.

And then there's a guy I used to see who was a junkie and dealer. I saw him passing some kind of little package to a young woman who started out looking like she was a fresh college graduate applying for jobs and then deteriorated and then disappeared. I don't know what happened to her. I hope she cleaned up. The junkie who was supplying her should be dropped into a big hole somewhere. People like him deserve nothing. No sympathy, no help, and no compassion.

So, a different approach to each person. The guy with mental illness problems requires one kind of solution and really does need our help. The beggars should have the opportunity to clean up and get somewhere. Once that opportunity exists for them, then they should be cut off if they don't take it.

The young woman who fell apart may have had an opportunity to clean up and get back into society. I hope so. If not, she was one who probably would have benefited from a legal spot where she could learn about how to get out of addiction.

And the last guy, the dealer/junkie gets the back of the hand aimed at his head as hard as possible. There's no sure-fire way to tailor the response to each person, really. And, we are finally holding the pharmaceutical companies somewhat responsible for pushing profitable pain pills as hard as they have over the last decade. It's a little like trying to explore a jungle without a map or a guide.
 
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#46
Gaolee said:
I lived on the same block as the unofficial alternative. It was bad, really bad.
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This was in Seattle?

We've heard how bad San Francisco is, and I lived in Portland and that city, too, is notorious for hard drugs.
The commonality with these West Coast cities, obviously, is the port town thing - these cities are,
historically, on major drug routes. Junkies have long gravitated there to be closer to more drugs.

In places like Portland, the young musicians embrace historic tradition and dabble with drugs because of
what is essentially a romantic tradition, and this feeds the cycle, too.
 
#47
Could drug injection sites help? Possibly, but I'm skeptical. To me it seems a new twist on the free needle exchange program, which on paper sounds like a good idea, I don't believe it's really changed much based on the continual spread of disease in the drug addicted population.

I think the money would be better spent on making it a site that offers rehab and counseling programs. One of the biggest complaints from I've heard from drug addicts (via the media) is that there is a long backlog of people waiting to get into rehab programs.
 
#48
People who are on hard drugs, and to the point where they are sharing/re-using needles are often:

1. Going to die young,
2. turning to crime to help pay for their habit,

Allowing them to continue to persist in this behavior is not going to change that. Our goal should be in curing, not helping perpetuate a self-destructive situation.
 
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#49
buldog5151bass said:
People who are on hard drugs, and to the point where they are sharing/re-using needles are often:

1. Going to die young,
2. turning to crime to help pay for their habit,

Allowing them to continue to persist in this behavior is not going to change that. Our goal should be in curing, not helping perpetuate a self-destructive situation.
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That's just it, they are helping. You can't "cure" people, but you can help them. In this case, keeping them alive. (Toronto reported 0 OD's for its site over a year). Some people will be sick and tired, and they can get guidance and help there.

These sites actually reduce costs to the county resulting from those OD's so it's actually a win win. And we already definitively know that the war on drugs doesn't work. These sites aren't saying that injecting hard drugs is OK, they are just trying to make sure people don't die doing what they are going to do anyway, and somewhere away from citizens.
 
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#50
FingerDub said:
That's just it, they are helping. You can't "cure" people, but you can help them. In this case, keeping them alive. (Toronto reported 0 OD's for its site over a year). Some people will be sick and tired, and they can get guidance and help there.

These sites actually reduce costs to the county resulting from those OD's so it's actually a win win. And we already definitively know that the war on drugs doesn't work. These sites aren't saying that injecting hard drugs is OK, they are just trying to make sure people don't die doing what they are going to do anyway, and somewhere away from citizens.
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People who get treatment can stop using drugs. That should be the goal - to get as many people off drugs as possible. Looking at it for the good of society, I would rather get one person clean than help ten people continue this addiction that is destructive to themselves, their families, and society.

I don't look at these facilities as "helping" anything but helping them continue to use drugs, rather than to try to get clean. No one said it was easy, but it can be done.

IMHO.
 
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#54
[…] So there's a very famous set of studies conducted in the US called the Adverse Childhood Experience studies, or the ACE studies. The ACE studies looked at 17,000 people, most of them middle class, at least half of them or more university educated, and they correlated the incidence of adult outcomes with childhood adversity. Childhood adversity meant physical or sexual, emotional abuse, the death of a parent, a parent being addicted, a parent being mentally ill, a parent being jailed, violence in the family, a divorce. And for each of these adverse experiences, the risk of addiction went up exponentially.

So by the time a male child has experienced six of these adversities, his risk of becoming an injection-using substance-dependent adult is 4,600% greater than that of a male child with no such experiences. A 46-fold increase, if you will. And what I mean by that is that people use drugs to escape the pain that is ingrained in them by their childhood experiences. They use the drugs to escape from the sense of discomfort with the self that is a necessary and unavoidable outcome with childhood adversity.

And furthermore, the part that most physicians don't even understand, is that the brain itself is shaped by early experiences, so that which circuits in the brain develop and which don't depends very much on the environment. That's what brain science has told us over the last three decades. So we look at the brain circuits that are implicated in drug addiction, which is to say the opiate circuitry which is the circuitry of reward and pleasure, the circuitry of incentives and motivation which is the dopamine circuitry, these brain chemicals and circuits are actually shaped by the early experiences. And the brain in the early years, unless the child has a set of nurturing, connected, attuned, emotionally available adults, does not develop optimally. So what you have in the case of adversity is emotional pain, poor self-esteem, shame and alienation, and disturbed brain circuits, and this is the setup for addiction. […]
The addicted mind
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#57
FingerDub said:
This is a bridge for them to get there. You can't just go plucking people off the streets.

Also, I'm not your research boy. Look it up yourself if you are interested.
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With all due respects - no. YOU are the one who says there is "research and results" that say it will help them. I don't see it. Please show me some objective data that shows that drug injection sites specifically will help get people get off drugs, as opposed to getting them to drug treatment.
 
#58
FingerDub said:
Fine.

Invalid Link Removed

Injection Sites Provide Safe Spots To Shoot Up | HuffPost
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Here's the data from the Huff Post article above:


Kral and a coauthor, the only researchers who have access to the facility, offered limited data on its results in a recent report: Invalid Link Removed and many have been able to get into treatment and sign up for social services.

In Vancouver, at Canada’s first supervised injection facility, Insite, the staff says it saved more than 2,700 lives and referred at least 3,500 to addiction treatment in the first decade after it opened in 2003.

Researchers also found that Insite was responsible for a Invalid Link Removed in the surrounding neighborhood and a 9 percent reduction in the city overall. One study pegged the resulting health care cost savings to the city at $1.8 million per year.

At Corner Project, the staff says it rescued 65 people from drug overdoses last year and referred 150 to treatment. This year, the numbers are expected to be higher. But not as high as they could be if the facility were sanctioned, Evans said.

By sanctioning safe injection sites, the city would not be condoning drug use, Evans said. It would be letting drug users know: “We see you as a human being, and we want to help.”
 
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#59
The Huff Post article only says that it prevents overdoses and stops the spread of HIV - NOT that it helps them get clean. The Forbes article provides nothing other than it gets them off the streets and helps reduce overdoses. Neither shows anything about how it helps get them off drugs.

I am not for sending addicts to prisons - that is where we should be sending the people who sell illegal drugs. I do not believe that society should be doing anything to help them continue to use drugs.
 
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