Create rooms for needle users, create less room for discarded needles
It’s a parents worst nightmare. Whilst playing in the park a toddler cries out, their parent looks down and sees a used syringe needle sticking out of the palm of their child’s hand. A drug addict has used the shelter of the children’s play area at night to inject themselves, and then in a drug induced stupor they have simply discarded their paraphernalia, only for a child to stumble across it. An infection from a used needle will devastate any persons life, let alone a child’s, yet every day there is a high likelihood of this exact scenario happening in Canterbury, and very little being done to prevent it.
Canterbury has a drug problem. One part of our community has a problem with their addiction to drugs, and the majority have a problem with the massive safety and security issues this causes. Both need help to solve their problems. Fortunately, there is a tried and tested solution to both. Supervised drug consumption rooms, where drug addicts can go to use drugs legally and safely away from the public, with medical supervision. Sometimes referred to as ‘shooting galleries’, the rooms take drug use off the street, keeping the public safe, taking stress off the police and increasing the likelihood of a drug addict starting recovery.
The benefits are clear to both the drug users and the public. There would be fewer used sharps found in playgrounds and on pavements posing a serious threat to public safety, and we’d be less likely to see the distressing sight of someone shooting up in a public toilet or park, or even more unthinkable, the result of a fatal overdose. The medical supervision in the rooms would mean drug addicts would be more likely to accept long-term help, as well as preventing overdoses and the spread of HIV and Hepatitis.
Even with these clear benefits, there remains opposition to drug consumption rooms. That opposition is rooted in an unwillingness to accept that the status quo is not working, and an unwillingness to accept that sometimes you need to help the people that are causing the problems, to solve the problems.
Discarding used needles in a kids play area shows a complete lack of respect for the safety of others, but injecting drugs in the first place demonstrates that a person’s respect for themselves has fallen so low, it’s hardly a surprise they are unaware of, or don’t care about the problem their behaviour causes. They have fallen so deeply through the cracks in society, their standards are lower than most people can comprehend. This is not their fault. They were once a child themselves, with all the opportunity that lay before you and I when we were children, but for any number of reasons out of their control, they ended up travelling a path of destruction. Opportunities to help them were missed, and they were discarded by society, like the needles they now use.
So let’s change the way we approach the situation, let’s be bold and brave and open drug consumption rooms, so that we can keep children safe from the risks others are taking. And whilst we are being so daring and having the courage to tackle the result of hard drug abuse in a new way, let’s try and tackle the causes too. No one ever contracted a life changing disease by finding a cannabis joint, and no one ever died from a pot overdose. So let’s stop spending taxes and wasting police time hunting down marijuana suppliers and users, and instead, let’s focus resources on dealing with the real risks.
