Doctor Game: Doug Ford is dead right, injection sites are dead wrong

By Medicine Hat News on July 16, 2018.

Not all the lunatics are in the asylum. Why? Because federal prison officials are providing needles to prisoners so they can inject themselves with illegal drugs. Now, Doug Ford, Premier of Ontario, is being criticized for damning the use of injection sites in prison and in Canadian cities. Condoning drug use is the most illogical way to combat North America’s opioid epidemic. But what else would work?

The drug problem is like a cancerous growth that kills, not just people. Look at what has happened in Mexico and Colombia. Drug lords have amassed so much money they can bribe politicians, lawyers and the police. In effect, if not eliminated, illegal drugs can eventually destroy society as surely as malignancy kills patients. But will we ever learn from history?

Providing needles and drugs to prisoners is like giving an alcoholic another drink. He, or she, will keep coming back for another one. It also creates another bureaucracy. And in the end, bureaucracy needs the addicts for their employment, more than the addicts need the bureaucracy!

Some readers may think drug injection sites work. If that’s the case, why are 42,000 addicts, just in one Canadian province, lining up every week for methadone treatment, costing tens of millions of dollars to overburdened taxpayers?

So what would be effective in combatting the use of illegal drugs? I have bad news for Ford’s political critics, bleeding hearts, and do-gooders, in this country. You will continue to lose the war on drugs unless you bring back the death sentence. And with the current opioid epidemic, the need for capital punishment has never been more obvious.

Years ago in an address to the Empire Club of Toronto I complained that the court system has proven to be too inefficient for illegal drug dealers. That the solution was the creation of a special court to deal quickly with those caught pushing illegal drugs. In other words, the answer was Lee Kuan Yew’s “Singapore solution.”

Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, believed that you don’t show your teeth if you’re not prepared to bite. He decided to hang drug dealers until they heard this message, and it worked.

But is it such an immoral and unethical crime to hang drug dealers? After all, drug dealers are adding Fentynal to opiate drugs that kill thousands of North Americans. It’s a lethal drug combination that ends lives just as surely as pulling the trigger of a loaded gun.

Shakespeare was right when he wrote in the play Hamlet, “Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are relieved. Or not at all.”

Ford has his critics. I’m sure they will viciously use every means to attack his opinion on supervised drug-use sites. But he is dead right on this issue and I hope he does not back away from this important fight.

Moreover, Ford should know that the majority of feedback that I receive from readers conveys this important message. They are opposed to the politically correct, but ineffective, approach to fight this unprecedented drug epidemic.

I don’t know if Ford has visited Singapore. But if he has, he’s seen a clean and efficient society. The rules are well known, and if you break them, you are held responsible. He would also hear its criticism that our society has become “irresponsibly permissive.”

It’s my hope that Ford’s efforts to fight this cancerous growth of illegal drugs and more injection sites will receive overwhelming public support. Our society has sunk to a new low when some people and organizations believe that prisoners have the right to continue an illegal act even when incarcerated.

History shows that more money, more social workers, and injection sites will end in failure. As Aristotle preached, “Punishment is a form of a medicine.” Even the Bible is loaded with quotes demanding death for a variety of immoral acts. So what’s the choice? You either learn from Lee Kuan Yew, Aristotle, sage words of capital punishment from the Bible, and now the political opinion of Doug Ford, or society descends into chaos.

I’ll report what you think.