Should Cities Fund Needle Exchange Programs?

Borrowing to invest in failure is no longer an option...jt

"Drug War" does not properly deserve to be called a "failure." Failure implies some serious attempt at success. For the 40 years that I know about drug war , there has been no serious attempt at success or belief, except among a few fanatics, that the concept of repression through enforcement alone would have any chance of success. Even much maligned Richard Nixon, who is the progenitor of modern drug war, for the purely political reason that he saw his opponents as "pot smokers," proposed a budget that directed 50% of the drug-fighting funds to drug treatment.

Beat-cops know this; so do prosecutors. They are on the merry-go-round, they see how it goes around & around and down & down. A few of them even read the research. Those cops and prosecutors know that heroin prescription programs in Switzerland resulted in an 85% reduction in drug-related crime . You run the numbers --- even apart from the economic savings, you tell me what that rate of reduction in crime would do for the safety and security of American communities. Then go back and understand the underlying fact that 85% of these crimes are driven by the desperation of addiction, which is built into our system to insure profits for mobsters. Please, tell he how that makes sense? Drug war is not a failure, it is not even only a fraud although millions cynically profit from it, but when the people, who prosecute it, openly say that it doesn't work, there is a problem taking the concept of "drug-war," as anything other than a social harm, seriously. Yet, we continue to invest billions of borrowed dollars into the obvious failure and fraud, that "drug war" has become. America's "drug-war" is a farce.

Then we can talk about "They hate us for our freedom..." but don't get me started on what drug war has done to degrade the civil rights of citizens. As my father would have said: "It's a sin and a shame."

Compared to making heroin available to addicts or communicating the evisceration of our civil liberties in the name of "drug-war" ideology, advocacy for needle exchange is a no-brainer. Needle Exchange works; not doing needle exchange abets the spread of a sexually transmitted disease that threatens our children 's lives while failure to fully implement this reasonable prevention effort accelerates the bankruptcy of our public health system.

And the reason not to implement this successful intervention is... Quoi? ¿Que? What?