Looks like Toronto mayor Rob Ford is running the wrong city.
In what is being called “an effort to stop the spread of disease among drug users,” a company in Vancouver is running crack pipe vending machines in its Downtown Eastside neighborhood that sell pipes to crack users for less than the price of a Twix bar.
The vending machines are being operated by Insite, a company that is still North America’s only supervised safe injection site and used by up to 800 drug addicts every day.
Supporters of the machines, which offer Pyrex pipes to crack smokers for just 25 cents each, hope the initiative stops the spread of Hepatitis C and HIV among Vancouver’s large crack-smoking population.
According to Kailin See of the Portland Hotel Society’s Drug Users Resource Center, each new case of Hep C or HIV costs taxpayers up to $250,000. Many of those cases come from the Downtown Eastside neighborhood, which is known as Canada’s “poorest postal code.”
The biggest complaint among city officials? The machines encourage drug use among young people. The biggest complaint among crack smokers? You guessed it: the vending machines don’t sell crack.
(via UPI)
Meanwhile, you still can’t buy liquor in 29 Kansas counties: 10 of the Weirdest Drinking Laws In America
