Politics, Science and Harm Reduction

Macleans has an interesting column making the case for the role of politics in decisions about programs like Insite:

...each person’s own opinions on federalism may not line up neatly with his views on drug policy. Indeed, if you are a strong centralist when it comes to Confederation AND you loathe the Harper government, or you’re just a centralizer who favours harm reduction, it seems to me that the Insite controversy has painted you into a rather awkward corner.

As far as I can tell, we are not having the kind of debate that would force such a person to say “I hate that those anti-science Conservative nutbars are trying to crush Insite, but they certainly have the right to do so.” Nor are we hearing from decentralizing socons who might say “I sure hate the idea of doctors getting paid good money to hover over diseased vermin while they irrigate their veins with poison, but as much as I like the Prime Minister, he should damn well stay out of B.C.’s business.”

I would add that this fundamental constitutional question is all the more important because, unlike many fellow libertarians and supporters of harm reduction, I don’t really believe that the value of safe-injection clinics is something that can be settled by a simple appeal to the authority of science. Science is well-placed to answer narrow, specific measurement questions about drug policy: “Did Insite reduce the number of overdose deaths in the region between years X and Y?”, for example. By answering such questions, it can provide the material for a broader assessment of the worth of such programs. But it cannot decide by fiat.

Insite has to be judged by its effects on many groups of citizens—not just the drug users who visit Insite, but the drug users who don’t and won’t; the families and loved ones of both groups of addicts; the dealers; the cops; the ordinary people who live near the clinic, and elsewhere in the region; the B.C. government, its treasury, and its taxpayers. (An environmentalist, or a Lorax, would even say that the non-human world should have a voice.) Within none of these groups are the effects simple or quantifiable by means of a single number, and all of the groups may have different claims to moral consideration, claims that there can be no universal agreement on. Moreover, the integrity of the criminal law and the public’s respect for it do count for something—maybe not much, but not zero—in this equation. The defender of Conservative policy would argue that this makes us all parties to the controversy, even outside B.C.

In short, science can’t provide us with a simple, scalar Benthamite answer to the net utility of Insite. To oppose Insite is not to be opposed to “science”, though a lot of scientists like Insite. Whether the clinic ought to exist is a question well-suited to be answered by political means: public and private argument, consensus-building, horse-trading, the consulting and balancing of moral principles, et cetera. Since this is the case, the question of what political unit should have the power to make the decision—the federation, or the province—is both crucial and urgent.