Karin Litzcke, Special to the National Post

Published: Thursday, August 28, 2008

The people who speak out the most vociferously in favour of Insite are addicted, not to the drugs themselves, but to the living they earn from serving drug addicts or, less concretely but just as dangerously, to the ecstatic feeling of beneficence that comes from believing they are helping the downtrodden.

These are the people to whom Insite really matters; not the drug addicts themselves, but the bureaucrats and politicians who will have smaller empires if Insite is closed. They are selling Insite to the public on the basis that harm reduction represents the compassionate way to deal with addiction. They are the empathy industry.

But the comfort offered by harm reduction is as empty, as fleeting, and ultimately as destructive as the comfort offered by drugs themselves.

Like most families of drug addicts, our first instinct upon finding out we had a drug addict in our midst was to engage in harm reduction. But what we found out, and what most families eventually find out, is that if we didn’t let the addict destroy himself and his own assets, he would destroy ours. Every family eventually has to cut itself free from its addict for its own protection.

The addict is going to lose everything to drugs anyway. What is optional is whether the rest of the family loses everything too.

Addicts on the street in a harm reduction environment will eventually take the same toll on communities as they did on their families. Communities, like families, can only give so much.

But the difference between the family with one addict and the community with a bundle of them is that the community’s experience is mediated through the layer of service providers who form the empathy industry and its political constituency. Unlike the family and community, which suffer for every additional concession made to addicts, the empathy industry grows and expands with each concession.

When the community begins to have the same conversations that families do — when talk of reducing damage to the community begins to supersede talk of reducing harm to the addicts — the agencies manipulate public discussion in the opposite direction. They present information selectively, cloud issues with emotion, keep the lens on the addicts rather than on the community, divide communities by keeping issues polarized and vilify opposing proposals, such as closing Insite.

So even if the addicts are doing intolerable harm to the community, the agencies seek to prevent communities from exercising the option that so many families have discovered is essential for their own survival: just saying no.

Besides holding communities hostage to addiction by playing on compassion, the harm reduction industry claims to save lives, but in an addict’s world that is a complicated concept, especially if the alternative to death is not recovery but chronic, lifelong addiction and concomitant mental deterioration. Addicts are driven, for whatever reason, to flirt with death, to the extent that they try harder to chase danger the more you try to keep them safe. They do more drugs and other crazy things if they do not feel close enough to the edge. Insite may resuscitate people, but chances are those people would not have overdosed on the street; they can take bigger doses in Insite because a nurse is there.

Whatever the real story is on addict outcomes, we won’t hear it from the empathy industry because their interests are not aligned with the interests of the community.

Like families, communities are interested in helping addicts recover, even if letting them find the will to recover means letting them face a greater risk of death. Neither families nor communities can tolerate the burden of sustaining chronic addiction.

The harm reduction industry has the exact opposite objective; continued chronic addiction is what spins off their bureaucratic, academic or political careers. They do not benefit from recovery.

Because of this lack of alignment in objectives, we cannot let our conversations about addiction be controlled by people who benefit from providing services to chronic addicts. They may understand addicts, but they don’t understand us.

Addicts get really mad at their families when we refuse to give them money, because they lack the ability to understand any need except their need for drugs. They have lost their empathy, even for the people they were once closest to.

And it is empathy for the community that is missing from the current Insite defense campaign that is being put on by the harm reductionists. That lack of respect for our right to be separate and to think differently and to guard our resources to use for our own purposes rather than for supporting chronic drug addiction is what reveals adherents of harm reduction as being addicted themselves. They are willing to sacrifice community well-being for their own.

KPL@telus.net-Karin Litzcke lives in Vancouver.