Thursday, June 28, 2007

Utopian social engineers - 0, Human nature - 1,675,789,456

Australia's experiment with injecting rooms is encouraging junkies to overdose.

These rooms are places where drug addicts can go to inject themselves with heroin. There are nurses on station to prevent overdoses and help the addicts with their habits.

Well it turns out the giving these people a safe zone to do drugs only encourages them to do more drugs. The addicts know that if they overdose there is a good chance that the nurses on staff will be able to bring them back to life. Therefore they are encouraged to use more. As a consequence, the overdose rate in these rooms is much higher than that of the average junkie getting high at home.

Only an idiot could not see this coming. The Utopians think that they are helping these people, but all they are doing is giving them higher tolerances for illicit substances that ruin their lives. This is further proof that when you encourage, or at least remove the worst consequences from bad behavior, the situation gets worse not better.