Wow, giving away free needles to drug addicts could actually backfire?

Who knew?

As I have noted in previous posts (here) efforts to promote "safe" drug use among addicts only leads to worse problems.

In San Fran's Golden Gate Park, addicts are discarding hundreds of needles that they get in the city's needle exchange program.

I hope families in the city feel safe now. They can take their kids down to the park to tiptoe through the syringes.

The city handed out 2 million syringes last year. They probably only get back 70%. Park officials believe that they pull about 100-200 needles out of the park a day.

Folks, when you encourage bad behavior, you only get more of it. The Utopians thought that if they offered addicts needles, they could get them to behave responsibly. An addict is by definition someone who is not going to behave responsibly.

Great, maybe they have helped a few hundred addicts avoid getting AIDS, but they are exposing thousands of innocent park goers to disease by giving these people an easy way out.

It may sound like cold calculus, but when the addicts could not get their needles so easily, they tended to hang on to them. This logically limited their danger by keeping them with the addicts who were already practicing a dangerous lifestyle.

Now that the tools are cheap and plentiful, the users can throw them away because they can always get more at a needle exchange. The risk to innocent park users is just too great.