OPINION
Once again Colorado lawmakers are currently considering the possibility of allowing supervised drug injection sites. Denver City Council voted 12 to 1 in November 2018 to approve a pilot program. It’s back again.
In January 2019, Steffan Tubbs and I, and former Denver Police Officer Mark Crowley went to Vancouver, which was home to North America’s first and finest injection facility. It was a hellhole.
It’s like telling people to stay on drugs and keep ruining your life. That’s how I saw Vancouver. Mark Crowley a 30-plus year Denver street cop said he’s never seen anything quite like it. Vancouver’s downtown east side is an outdoor drug market and death emporium. And now the clarion call returns to bring it to Colorado.
The United States of America currently has two safe injection sites in New York City, and Rhode Island has one. New York is requesting millions of dollars to fund four additional sites in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. Does anybody really understand what Pandora’s box would be released by safe injection sites?
At the time an elected Denver official said he had visited Vancouver, and you could put one of those injection sites at his house. I immediately threw the BS flag. Anyone who’s been at one of those sites and watched the neighborhood turn into a place where dealers openly sell drugs like ballpark hotdog vendors and children step over syringes to get to the school bus knows no one would want one in their neighborhood. The programs in New York and throughout the country are a re-creation of the Opium Wars that brought about the end of the dynasties of China.
What did we learn from the Opium Wars? History, the great teacher, what was learned in history? That people ignore the causes and effects of the Opium War. The British had been illegally exporting opium from the same place it comes from today, Afghanistan. Addiction to opium became widespread in China causing serious social and economic disruption. In 1840, the Chinese government confiscated and destroyed chests of opium. Later that year the British began the first of the so-called Opium Wars. The more powerful British were easily victorious over the Chinese. The addiction ultimately led to the weakening of the Chinese dynastic system and paved the way for the warlords.
None of that’s lost on the Chinese. They’re the principal supplier of fentanyl. It’s an incredibly powerful and addictive synthetic heroin. If you remember the original advocates for supervised injection sites wanted safe injection sites principally for free drug paraphernalia to use heroin. This was way before fentanyl was as prevalent as it is today.
Fentanyl has increased the death toll of IV drug users.
What is the goal of these people? They say they want to stop the spread of disease associated with dirty needles. They want to make it safe for people to commit suicide on the installment plan. There are enough problems in the city of Denver right now; imagine if you were to add safe injection sites.
The Mandarin class that allowed the opium into China is really no different than the Mandarin class in Colorado and Denver. When opium got off-the-leash and into the mouths of the working class Chinese the dynasty came to an end. Imagine the enticements that would be offered up to young people when it becomes okay to use a drug that makes Chinese opium look like a Bayer aspirin. The call goes out. This has been beaten back in Colorado once before, for God’s sake don’t let them bring safe injection sites back.
Forgive them Lord for they know not what they do. Or do they?
— Peter Boyles