Canadian cities are currently wrestling with the health and safety issues associated with strung-out junkies stealing to earn enough to take care of their habit, dirty crack pipes and needles laying around for kids to pick up in residential areas, and the associated spread of hepatitis C and HIV, the virus associated with AIDS.

But is distributing crack pipes to addicts in Canadian cities to halt the spread of disease currently doing more harm then good by encouraging drug abuse, asks senior RCMP official, Chief Superintendent, Derek Ogden. Does it sends the wrong message to individuals who might be currently experimenting with drug use, and actually increasing drug use in each city.

The number of drug addicts in Canada is increasing despite new programs in Toronto, Vancouver, and Ottawa that give safe clean glass crack pipes, tiny screens and mouthpieces to addicts, in an effort to halt or even lessen the transmission of disease from using dirty crack pipes, say the opponents of the controversial programs.

The reality of the situation is that people are going to continue to use drugs, in their preferred mode of transmission, no matter what we do, or whatever program we implement, it’s a symptom of a greater disease affecting a portion of our population susceptible to addiction, the disease of fear.

The feeling that there is only one door for us to enter, that we have no options and life is closing in around us, the need to escape ourselves and the world around us. The fear of failure, any emotional trauma we don’t want to look into, can lead us as humans to fall into the hole of addiction; the truth is all creatures are creatures of habit.

It’s these symptoms that we must treat if we are to over come addiction, in all its forms, not just drug addiction, although, it has been front and center in the growing controversy over all forms of addiction in Canada, lately.

The programs like the ones above alleviate some of the problems associated with drug abuse, theft, some disease, but stop short of treating the real problems leading individuals to do drugs. We need to reassess many parts of our society, and the way we think toward those we see as addicts and realise they aren’t that different from us, they have just travelled down a different road, one that at the time they took it, seemed to be the only road available to get away from their pain and now they can’t find a side road off of, its our job as fellow humans to show them that road.