James Breckenridge ('Setting aside facts - May 28/13) is motivated by genuine care for his friends, but his is wrong.
Supplying addicts with the means to keep them in bondage to their addictions is wrong. What works is abstinence. We need to give addicts enormous help in housing, counseling, rehabilitation, but not the tools of continued enslavement.
Fraser Health, Pivot and James say that Abbotsford's attempt to stop needle exchange is the reason addicts have life-threatening diseases. No, the reason for those diseases and death is the degeneration of health that follows increasing drug use. Council was right to try to prevent needle-exchange.
I've sat in on a lot of abstinence programs over this past decade. A frequent phrase there is that addictions lead to jails, institutions and death.
Thousands of people who climb their way out of the horror of addictions say that enabling their use just kept them in that bondage.
Drugs are illegal because they destroy lives, they rip families apart. To say as James does that we are denying health care, is to twist the meaning of those words.
Gerda Peachey