Surrey’s Mayor Linda Hepner has taken a lot of heat on social media and in the press for her reluctance to see a so-called “safe drug injection site” set up in her city, but we think she’s the voice of reason on this matter.
Health officials recently called for such a facility to be located in Surrey after numerous overdoses in Whalley occurred as a result of drug addicts unknowingly injecting fentanyl, along with heroin, into their veins.
Setting up a “safe consumption site,” as it’s euphemistically called, is ironically establishing a permanent Band-Aid solution that will not cure drug addiction but rather help users stay on their destructive path. That volunteers collected 592,073 dirty needles from Surrey’s streets last year bears testimony to that.
Let’s face it, nobody wants to be a junkie, and putting that first needle into your arm is, to say the least, one of the worst decisions a person can make.
We don’t hand out guns, pills or rope to people contemplating suicide, and yet we hand out needles and provide “safe consumption sites” to people who are tragically killing themselves on the slow.
We are told that drug addiction is a disease. If that’s so, it should be treated as such – medically.
Do public health officials set up smoking areas for cancer patients? Of course not. Why, then, are injection sites being set up for drug addicts when these people need real treatment, and should be treated as patients, to help rid them of this terrible disease they are afflicted with?
The Now
