Call them needle exchanges; call them safe-use sites; sugar-coat them as “overdose prevention centers.” By any name, they offer most illegal drug users a one-way trip to the dead end of addiction.

You’d think policymakers would dismiss the concept as absurd: setting up officially sanctioned places where addicts from the streets can get clean needles and expert oversight to sustain their deadly habit. Instead of fighting Colorado’s plague of addiction, advocates of safe-use sites would feed it. They’d have your local city hall or county government supervise the abuse of hard, often-deadly drugs like heroin and meth so the users can get high. Supposedly, safely.

It’s senseless, and reckless – yet, it looks like the Legislature may consider letting local governments do just that.

As reported in The Gazette, an interim legislative committee studying opioid abuse released the first draft of a bill last week to permit the so-called safe-use sites. Members of the committee will vote Oct. 30 whether to advance the bill for consideration by the full Legislature when it convenes in January.

It was bad enough Denver’s City Council passed a law several years ago authorizing the facilities; at least, it has been blocked since then by state and federal law. Now, alarmingly, the Legislature wants to get in on the act and permit the sites in any locale in the state.

As we’ve noted here before, Colorado is indeed in the midst of an addiction crisis. It’s a major cause of crime and is at the root of much of the chronic homelessness on our streets. Addiction tears apart families, leaves addicts unemployable and ruins lives. It creeps into schools and undermines youths. And, of course, it kills.

But that’s all the more why the response must be to move addicts into rehab – not to aid and abet their addictions.

The notion that any of the sites themselves might prompt drug users to enter rehab is essentially wishful thinking in the eyes of experts. Stanford University drug policy researcher Keith Humphreys told the interim committee in testimony in August that evidence simply doesn’t support the claim that safe-use sites lead to rehab.

The sites just prolong the agony of addicts by stringing them out longer with sterile needles and expert guidance to make sure they don’t overdose. Until their next fix, that is – under a bridge; in a tent in a homeless camp; in a public library’s restroom – when they do overdose.

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When pressed, even the sites’ most ardent advocates in the “harm reduction” movement acknowledge they serve little purpose beyond curbing hepatitis from dirty needles and, perhaps, occasionally heading off an overdose by providing expert advice on shooting up.

We’ll say it again: to help perpetuate in any way one of the most crippling and destructive 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 – covered in a latex glove.

How about a humane approach that actually works? Arrest addicts for possession, followed by immediate diversion to rehab – with a court-ordered expectation to kick the habit.

In other words, nursing them back to health and beyond their addictions. Now, that’s real compassion. And it’ll keep a lot more people alive in the long run.

Denver Gazette Editorial Board