Denver is afflicted with an addiction crisis. It’s a major driver of metro-area crime, from auto theft to domestic violence. It’s a fundamental cause of chronic homelessness on our streets. It rips apart families, renders addicts unemployable and ruins their lives. It creeps into our schools and undermines our youth.

While the root causes of addiction are many, varied and much debated, we should at least be able to agree as a community not to make matters worse. For one thing, that means avoiding policies that address dangerous and highly addictive drugs like meth, heroin and fentanyl – by actually indulging their use.

So-called “safe-injection sites” offer a prime example. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions, there must be a safe-injection site at every pitstop along the way.

The sites – in use in some European and U.S. cities, and authorized by Denver’s City Council in 2018 but never implemented – provide users clean syringes and oversight by medical professionals. That way, addicts can shoot up illegal drugs without getting arrested, contracting hepatitis or overdosing. Then, they can continue their steady descent into the self-destructive depths of addiction and all its misery – with the blessing of local authorities.

As noted in a Gazette news report the other day, safe-injection sites won’t be opening any time soon in Denver after a state Senate committee in April voted down legislation that would have permitted them. Current state law prevents local policies like Denver’s 2018 ordinance from taking effect. So does federal law. That’s a good thing.

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It’s not just the sites’ obvious ripple effects on the community – 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-injection policies that’s the biggest problem. Their premise is preposterous to begin with.

To help perpetuate in any way one of the most crippling, destructive and all-around counterproductive 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. One that’s covered in a latex glove.

Even the sites’ most ardent advocates – the folks in the “harm reduction” movement – can’t credibly claim they cure or even treat addiction. They only can tout the sites’ potential to prevent overdoses while users are on site, and to slow the spread of infectious diseases that typically accompany intravenous drug use.

Those are of course worthy ends in themselves – but not at the cost of enabling the potentially deadly addiction that fosters overdose and disease in the first place. And that’s not to mention addiction’s devastating impact on the rest of the community.

Denver has been reeling from those wide-ranging ill effects. Look no further than the addiction culture’s role in fomenting crime, and it’s pretty clear why Denver must push back at policies that wink at illegal drug use. Denver’s spiraling crime rate arguably makes as strong a case for a crackdown on illegal drugs as does the death toll from fentanyl overdoses.

Merely making illegal drug use “safer” isn’t going to cut it. What’s needed is a return to vigorous law enforcement with mandatory rehab programs a key component. Policy makers are starting to get that, as the state Senate committee’s vote demonstrated. It’s noteworthy that both mayoral candidates in Denver’s June 6 runoff are opposed to the sites.

Safe-injection sites are a copout. Truly compassionate drug policy doesn’t manage addiction; it conquers it. It liberates addicts so they can lead fulfilling lives – for their own sake and that of the whole community.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board