The word from the Capitol this week is that state lawmakers might try again to legalize "safe use" sites — where addicts from the streets can get clean needles and expert oversight as they feed their deadly habit. Usually, via syringe.

That's right; instead of fighting the scourge of addiction — a priority that, not long ago, enjoyed universal support — your local city hall or county government could wind up helping administer technically illegal, potentially lethal drugs such as heroin and meth.

To the "harm reduction" crowd, which seems to have the ear of this Legislature, it represents the progressive path to public health nowadays. In other words, enabling addiction rather than healing it.

At least one Colorado city, Denver, has an ordinance on the books permitting the sites. It was enacted in 2018.

But state and federal law bar the local policy from taking effect. During last spring's legislative session, a state Senate committee voted down legislation that would have permitted safe-use sites statewide.

Now, an interim legislative committee is entertaining the idea anew. The Opioid and Other Substance Use Disorders Study Committee voted this week to draft legislation for consideration by the full Legislature when it convenes in January.

The committee still has to shape up its final list of bills to present to the 2024 session, and a safe-use bill might not make the cut. So, it's a good time to throw cold water on a bad idea.

There's no doubt Colorado is facing an addiction crisis. It's a major cause of crime and is fundamentally at root of much of the chronic homelessness on our streets. Addiction tears apart families, leaves addicts unemployable and ruins lives. It creeps into schools and undermines youths.

And that's not to mention addiction's death toll; 920 Coloradans died from fentanyl overdoses last year — fentanyl being the deadliest drug in our state in recent years.

Addiction is indeed at an epidemic level in Colorado — which is all the more why we must fight it, not feed it.

Safe-use sites provide users clean syringes and oversight by medical professionals. Addicts can shoot up illegal drugs without getting arrested, contracting hepatitis or overdosing.

Which means they can continue their steady descent into the self-destructive depths of addiction and its misery. And when they eventually perish on the streets, in agony — it at least will be with the blessing of local authorities. How nice.

It's not just the sites' obvious ripple effects on the community that make them a nonstarter — how they foster crime; aid and abet the illegal drug trade by providing cover for pushers, and wreak havoc with nearby neighborhoods. It's the very nature of safe-use policies that's the biggest problem. Their premise is absurd to begin with.

To help perpetuate in any way one of the most crippling and destructive maladies in our society is cynical and cruel. It's as if to say the addicts are going to kill themselves anyway, so let's give them a hand — covered in a latex glove.

And here's the crux of it: Even the sites' most ardent advocates acknowledge their only potential is in curbing the spread of infection and, on occasion, an overdose. What they don't do is cure addiction; they abet it.

Truly compassionate public health policy would seek to separate the addict from the deadly drug, ASAP. In practical terms, that means arrest for possession, followed by immediate diversion to rehab. That's real reform. And it works.

The Gazette Editorial Board

REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS DISPATCH

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