When it comes to offering help to drug users job one is an elementary obligation used all over the world—giving drug users a safe place to do drugs.

Such a place should be calm, germ-free, and supervised by a specialist who can step in if a person starts to overdose. With safe-injection facilities, users are no longer shooting up on the streets and in back alleys. They have a place to dispose of used needles and paraphernalia. And brings this dramatic benefit: nobody dies of a drug overdose in a safe injection facility. In other words, drug users are no longer treated as a nuisance but find a place that welcomes them.

It doesn’t send a “bad” message. If messaging works, the users would never have acquired a habit. In the United States and all over Europe, people were using drugs when George Washington was President, and they are still using them 240 years later.

Drug users and their allies in the public health community deserve relief from the falsehood that they are solely responsible for their problems. It’s a chance for the users to learn about health tips and find comfort.

Creating this environment is a political problem. Medically supervised injection rooms involve a political choice. Who do you want in charge of providing services? Former users, health professionals, and sensible loving people or judges and cops?

A person has a right to choose how they want to get high, constantly harassing them should be unconstitutional. Drug users are citizens who deserve the same rights as non-users.

We are still in the middle of a crackdown on oxycontin, which is addictive. Private corporations were blamed, and the supply was cut. As a legal drug, the supply of oxy could be cut simply by changing the laws and bringing lawsuits. But in a thoughtless display of callousness nobody offered help to the men and women who had made oxy part of their lives.

With a little prompting anyone over 15 could predict the outcome: some people would stop using, others would use occasionally, and some would buy drugs illegally. This isn’t rocket science.  Users went to the illegal market; remember, the politicians offered them no other choice-stop using or buy illegally-no other options were offered.

Guess what? Drug cartels and fentanyl makers had a larger market and drug overdoses skyrocketed. Every year accidental overdoses of drug users take more lives than the U.S. lost in the Vietnam War.  That is what happens when we ignore the needs of drug users, who are friends, lovers, and often desperately trying to please. Their wishes and needs are ignored. A harsh reaction making drug users into lepers.

Only a political change can make government abandon its belief that drug users cause their own problems and don’t deserve help unless they give up their habit.  It has never worked in the past and it isn’t working now.