Dateline May 12, 2008

Victoria, British Columbia –

Victoria, Vancouver, even my home town of Prince George in the beautiful, yet troubled, region of Canada called British Columbia has a small percentage of drug users that tend to hang out in the cities downtown core, they like to panhandle.

They live their lives as they wish, leaving syringes laying about the streets, when they don’t have a safe place to put them that is, and often when they do, but providing them with the ability to take their needles off the streets is a needed service.

Victoria, and maybe additional BC cities in the future if the plan works, has recently announced the introduction of an old, and new idea for BC, a pilot program designed to help take discarded needles off the streets and away from the public. The plan will see the distribution of five boxes that will be centrally located in the downtown area for drug users to put their used needles into for disposal and an accompanied awareness program is planned as well to help users deal with their problems.

The tax payers are dishing out $3,000 per box being distributed in the Victoria downtown area, and an additional $20,000 will be required to keep the boxes supplied with liners for the boxes, hiring someone to empty the boxes, and daily checks to ensure that they are being used and emptied.

This is a plan that has been used successfully in other parts of the world tasked with the problem of dealing with drug users living and leaving their needles lying about for anybody to find, and it will probably at least alleviate part of the problem in Victoria, but is like treating a symptom of the problem.

The real problem lies with society, the government, and our way of life, that often leaves some individuals alone and in the dark without any obvious exit, from their point of view. Their escape into the darkness of drug abuse is a cry against the pain they feel, their inability to deal and cope with the feelings their having and their desire not to face the truth.

Drug abusers are people lost in pain, confused and unwilling to face the truth, they hide within a drug filled haze that takes their pain away, so they fall, often to a slow death.

While we need to take the needles off the streets and away from the kids and British Columbians’ living in BC, we need to realise that drug users are people in pain, people who need help, if they are going to deal with their pain and cope and we as human beings need to help them, not throw them aside because we feel they are lost.

If we are going to solve the problem of drug abuse in our society we need to deal with the social causes, not the symptoms we see every day. It’s kind of like the pharmaceutical companies and their products which are designed to mask the symptoms of the physical problem patients are feeling and not the actual causes of the problem that caused their medical problems.

Sure the drug abusers will feel better when they have their drugs, but like patients on pharmaceuticals it’s a fantasy, their pain and discomfort maybe gone, but the true causes of the problem still exist and are rotting from the inside out.