Opinion | Doug Ford is dead, the injection sites are completely wrong

All the crazy people are not in the asylum. Why? Because federal penitentiary authorities provide prisoners with syringes so that they can inject illicit drugs. Now, Doug Ford, Ontario's premier, has been criticized for condemning the use of injection sites in jails and in Canadian cities. Drug use is the most illogical way to combat the opioid epidemic in North America. But what else would work?

The problem of drugs is like a cancerous growth that kills, not just people. Look what happened in Mexico and Colombia. The drug barons have amassed so much money that they can bribe politicians, lawyers and the police. Indeed, if they are not eliminated, illicit drugs can eventually destroy society as surely as malignancy kills patients. But will we ever learn from history?

Providing prisoners with syringes and drugs is like giving another glass of alcohol. He or she will continue to come back for another. It also creates another bureaucracy. And in the end, bureaucracy needs drug addicts for their jobs – more than addicts need bureaucracy!

Some readers may think that drug injection sites work. If so, why do 42,000 addicts, just in one Canadian province, queuing weekly for methadone treatment, costing taxpayers over-taxed tens of millions of dollars?

So, what would be effective in the fight against the use of illicit drugs? I have bad news for Doug Ford's political critics, bleeding hearts and benefactors, in this country. You will continue to lose the war on drugs unless you bring back the death penalty. And with the current epidemic of opioids, the need for capital punishment has never been so obvious.

A few years ago, in a speech to the Empire Club of Toronto, I complained that the justice system was too inefficient for drug traffickers. That the solution has been the creation of a special court to deal quickly with those who are caught pushing illegal drugs. In other words, the answer was Lee Kuan Yew's "Singapore solution".

Lee Kuan Yew, former Prime Minister of Singapore, believed that you do not show your teeth if you are not ready to bite. He decided to hook drug traffickers until they heard that message, and it worked.

But is it an immoral and unethical crime to hang drug traffickers? After all, drug traffickers are adding fentynal to opiate drugs that kill thousands of North Americans. It's a combination of lethal drugs that ends life as surely as pulling the trigger of a loaded rifle.

Shakespeare was right when he wrote in the play Hamlet "Desperate diseases driven by desperate devices are relieved – or not at all."

Doug Ford has his critics. I am sure that they will use all means viciously to attack his opinion on the sites of supervised drug use. But he is quite right on this issue, and I hope he will not back down in front of this important fight.