This is nuts:

City health officials took steps Thursday toward opening the nation’s first legal safe-injection room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs under the supervision of nurses.

Hoping to reduce San Francisco’s high rate of fatal drug overdoses, the public health department co-sponsored a symposium on the only such facility in North America, a four-year-old Vancouver site where an estimated 700 intravenous users a day self-administer narcotics under the supervision of nurses.

I got all kinds of problems with this.

1. Who pays for the nurses and clinic space?  I can only assume it’s the taxpayers of San Francisco.  Probably with a little help from the taxpayers of California mixed in with a little more help by the taxpayers of the United States.  I for one have absolutely no desire whatsoever to condone drug addiction.  Addiction prevention and intervention, maybe.  Pacifying addiction, no way in hell.  That’s their path they chose to take, not mine.  If they want to kill themselves, do it at their own expense.  If I were living in San Francisco, a lawsuit would be flying to stop my money from abetting in a crime.
2. They say they’re trying to curb the expense of overdose emergency hospital visits.  There’s a much easier way to do it, if they have no insurance, and they’re overdosing from a situation they willfully got themselves into, leave them in the parking lot.  Social medical care is for those that NEED it, not those that ABUSE it.  When society gets that part straight, it will go a long way towards paying for SCHIP and other programs Pete Stark and Nancy Pelosi wants.  We can’t solve every problem.  What we can do is focus on the people who truly deserve it.  Addicts can solve their own problems and not be a burden on society.  Only their selfishness makes them a burden on the San Francisco health care system.  Pandering to that selfishness only will make it worse.
3. I work in the medical field at this time.  We are required to report situations that are detrimental to a client’s welfare and report the problem to the appropriate agency that can help resolve the situation.  Will these nurses be required to report these people to the various entities that could help them resolve their problem? 
4. How many of these people will be violating OTHER laws by going there such as parole and custody requirements?  How many laws will have to be ignored in order to provide this service?  To assume a heroin addict who has to rely on a public clinic to safely administer their hit is responsible in every other facet of life is a unrealistic leap that I’ll never be convinced of.
5. How are these burdens oon society going to repay society for all the free services they expect?  They’re just going to get free-heroin-assistance and walk away?  Horrible plan.  If they have nothing better to do than get stoned in the morning, they could be spending that time working for their heroin by cleaning up San Francisco or doing SOMETHING constructive.  My bet is if they were expected to do something, they’d never show up.
6. I can not believe you could find enough nurses in San Francisco that ethically could sit back and watch someone do that to their body.  That’s not the ethical standards of any nurse.  At least, that’s not what they teach in nursing in Kentucky.  Here you’re taught to try to mitigate or eliminate the problem, not make it worse. 
7. There are drug addiction specialists here as well as anywhere, but I would think they’d be rather appalled at the idea of the government assisting losers in staying stoned.  You want big brother, it couldn’t get any worse than this.
8. In San Francisco, you can pretty much come to the conclusion that they have surrendered in the war on drugs.  Pretty much exactly what Pete Stark and Nancy Pelosi want us to do in every war.  That’s just not my gut instinct.  If there’s a threat to my way of life and quality of life, I fight it.  If I see it as a threat to my kid, I fight it even harder.  For reasons completely alien to me, politicians from California seem to want to pacify it.  Have they never dealt with the consequences of drug addiction in their life?  I can’t imagine that they have not, and I can’t imagine, based on what’s going on in their back yard, that they have.  I just truly can’t imagine what the leaders of San Francisco are thinking right now.  I’m just glad they’re not here.

That’s probably enough for now.  I know I could go on.  This is a HORRID idea and if I lived anywhere near there I’d be suing on a myriad of legal reasons.  If nothing else, I think I could easily have the nurses working there arrested for aiding and abetting in a crime.  Using federal laws, all the FBI would have to do is walk in, find one drop of heroin, and all the assets of the clinic could be seized.  Which, in this case, it needs to be.

Did I say this idea is horrible?

Tags: clinic, Government, Health Care Debate, heroin, pete-stark, san-francisco, War On Drugs