SF considers legal shooting gallery

That's right, people are actually considering legal injection rooms in the USA; it's those crazy hippies in San Francisco. And this is news. From the AP story circulating today:

City health officials took steps Thursday toward opening the nation's first legal safe-injection room, where addicts could shoot up heroin, cocaine and other drugs under the supervision of nurses.

Hoping to reduce San Francisco's high rate of fatal drug overdoses, the public health department co-sponsored a symposium on the only such facility in North America, a 4-year-old Vancouver site where an estimated 700 intravenous users a day self-administer narcotics under the supervision of nurses.

...

Bertha Madras, deputy director of demand reduction for the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, called San Francisco's consideration of such a facility 'disconcerting' and 'poor public policy.'

'The underlying philosophy is, 'We accept drug addiction, we accept the state of affairs as acceptable,'' Madras said. 'This is a form of giving up.'

I prefer to think of it as giving in and growing up, but whatever. I say we hold a symposium on other things Canadians do well, like smoking weed and drinking beer. We can learn much from our enlightened neighbors to the North.