Are safe drug injection spaces beneficial?
A supervised injection site in Montreal, Canada, called CACTUS Montreal. Sites like these have been argued to encourage drug use by addicts, but the evidence is flimsy. These days it’s easy to find someone who believes in the supposed benefits marijuana provides for pain, municipal income, or even curing diseases. But the buck often stops there. What’s much rarer is to find someone extolling the usage of harder drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, or heroin. The latter’s effects on the user have been etched into the collective mind. But just because these drugs are definitively harmful, how do we help those who are already addicted? One such proposal has come under fire due to its seemingly absurdist logic: helping those addicted by providing safe spaces to consume drugs. The blog piece entitled “‘Let me inject heroin in a safe place, it’s my citizen right’” by Arnelious Dominich illustrates some arguments against such an idea. But is it actually such a bad idea? First, we need