A LEAP OF REASON NEEDED IN DRUG POLICY

Re: If a drug policy works, Harper wants nothing to do with it, May 18.

If these harm-reduction experiments -such as Insite in Vancouver
- -prove to be useful, then why is there so much resistance?

Columnist Dan Gardner calls Prime Minister Stephen Harper to account
for his defiance of the facts in this case, but of course it's a
tendency we all share. Humans live in a wildly abstracted world -this
makes the need to protect the oftenfaulty belief system that holds it
all together of utmost importance, even to the detriment of facts, if
they should threaten too much of the system.

So the resistance we see to evidence of harm-reduction strategies is,
sadly, the same that saw Galileo condemned for what he witnessed in
the night sky through his opera lenses. It's the same that saw
Socrates condemned for "corrupting" (teaching the critical thinking
that could threaten old beliefs) the youth of Athens.

If we pinpointed on a map all the people opposed to projects like
Insite, the dots could be random (because unchecked prejudice could
be random) except in one area: close to the sites. Close to the
evidence, there are no disbelievers among the staff. Hopefully, it's
clear that the staff and volunteers generally have one motive at
places like this -that they care about these forgotten people. When
they speak of answers that work we should listen, though it may take
a different kind of defiance: a leap of reason.

Mike Friis, Ashton