you would expect fiscal conservatives to support "safe" injection sites, because they minimize the amount of resources wasted on drug addicts.

i think that this discussion about "saving lives" is disingenuous on both sides. insofar as these injection sites are "safe", it's only temporary - we are taking about an addiction that will certainly eventually kill you. what "safe" means is that the needles aren't full of aids or hepatitis, which are both expensive to treat - and a frustrating cost, given that the spread of the diseases is preventable and the projected life span of the person being treated is short. it's legitimately deflating to fork out thousands of dollars of public money on anti-hiv drugs, only to find the patient dead of an overdose on the drug that gave them the disease. so, if you give them clean needles, you at least don't have to treat them for infections.

treatment doesn't work, either; you have to find ways to stop people from being so fucking stupid as to get hooked. and, with heroin, there isn't another description, unless a doctor injected you when you were unconscious - you can't not know the risks at this point, you have to just be plain out stupid. there's no excuse for this, anymore. you deserve your darwin award.

so, don't tell me that the sites save lives - they don't, they merely postpone death, and minimize the costs involved with managing the problem.

but, don't tell me that removing the sites would save lives either - because you're just going to end up with people dying of infections, instead.

we talk about harm reduction as though the addict's life is the most important concern, even though they've already written themselves off; with opiates, specifically, we should rather be treating the issue as an unnecessary public expense, and speaking about cost reduction.

this should actually be an issue where socialists and conservatives agree with each other, due to a convergence of thought around public resources. but, while the liberals are consistently incoherent on this kind of thing nowadays, the conservatives are constantly blinded by their own hypocrisy.

we should all support the sites; they save public money.