B.C. should stop enabling drug addiction

Re: “No plans for overdose-prevention sites at all B.C. hospitals,” Dix says,” April 21.

A request to Premier David Eby and the courts: For everyone’s safety, please stop enabling drug addiction.

As is the policy in Singapore, where one can walk down clean streets without fear of being accosted and where businesses thrive, please make decisions so that, when individual rights have a negative impact on the community, then community rights must take precedence.

Here, for the health and safety of the already-stressed-out hospital community, the consumption of street-type drugs and carrying of knives on hospital premises should never be permitted.

Health-care funds need to be spent treating patients, not creating space to enable the smoking of drugs whose harmful effects jeopardize the health of other patients and hospital staff.

For the sake of the school community, where smoking of tobacco products is prohibited, consumption of drugs should be banned from both school grounds and their environs.

For the overall community, especially businesses, the same prohibitions applied to smoking tobacco products should apply to drug consumption.

Drug addicts need access to treatment facilities, not to “free” drugs (paid for by the taxpaying community) and most certainly should not be given the “right” to consume drugs where it can cause harm to the overall community.

This enabling is just pure insanity, unjust to all and has to stop now.

Susan M. Woods Victoria