Rudy Giuliani annoys me with his arrogance as well as the fact that he is a poor excuse for a human being. I think maybe he should stop talking publicly, or privately, about anything. Or maybe he should just stop talking period.
Deviating from his attack on community organizers, he turned his attack on Instite,
Vancouvers safe-injection site. Insite provides drug users a place to inject and use drugs, under the supervision of nurses, as well as provides clean needles, condoms, and referrals to treatment. Guiliani -- of course mischaracterizing safe-injection sites as a place where
drug users can get free heroin, which is, not surprisingly, an OUTRIGHT LIE -- suggested that cities like Vancouver and Surrey could benefit from quality-of-life policing which he unwarrantably credits for cleaning up New York city.
I don't know about you guys, but quality-of-life unfairly infantilizes people for petty offenses. Only instead of giving them a time out in the corner, they are given a time out in jail. I guess that's pretty sweet: 3 hots and cot for jumping a turnstyle to avoid paying subway fair -- all at taxpayers expense I might add.
You can read about marijuana arrest quality-of-life crimes when I
blogged (second one down) about it several months ago.
The point of Insite is to encourage harm reduction practices amongst Vancouver's most vulnerable and marginalized drug users by reducing needle sharing and overdose deaths (out of hundreds of od's at the center,
NO ONE has died). In this capacity, Insite has more than succeeded as
studies(same as previous link) have shown (sorry guys, I was denied access to the original source.) You can also read more about Insite
here and
here (sorry about the Wiki reference, but it does have a lot of good sources).
Posted by Evan G.