Taipei Mayor Chiang Wanan has recently been frequently attacking the Democratic Progressive Party's candidate for Taipei mayor on the drug issue. Chiang said this morning (6th) that he had seen former Executive Yuan political commissar Zhang Jingsen say that Shen Boyang advocated heroin for medical use in Switzerland, and he had the same understanding after reading the article.
Zhang Jingsen refuted this afternoon that he never said such a thing and should not interpret it this way. "Switzerland has this kind of system" and "what Shen Boyang advocated back then was the Swiss model" are completely different things. There is a most basic premise when discussing public policy: first, speak the words of others correctly. "Don't put words in my mouth that I have not said."
Zhang Jingsen posted on Facebook that as long as the context and consequences of his articles from a few days ago are fully understood, his words should not be interpreted like this. The starting point of this debate was Shen Boyang's 2014 article. At that time, Shen wrote that if Taiwan cannot accept the decriminalization of drugs for the time being, "it can at least follow the example of some countries and establish community centers to provide drug users with drugs and clean needles, and introduce social work mechanisms to assist."
Zhang Jingsen said that his article mainly mentioned that the idea of transforming serious drug addicts from a criminal problem into a medical, public health and social governance problem was not invented by Shen Boyang out of thin air in 2014, nor was it some shocking proposition. Instead, many European countries have long developed various "harm reduction" policies.
He said that in 1995, then-Taipei Mayor Chen Shui-bian visited Europe and was first exposed to the Netherlands’ harm-reduction management thinking behind dealing with drugs, sex industry and other issues. Later, Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Denmark, and Canada also developed different forms of heroin-assisted treatment, of which Switzerland is particularly worthy of study. Switzerland once faced a very serious drug crisis, and later gradually established a "four-pillar" policy including prevention, treatment, harm reduction and law enforcement. Drug treatment, including medical-grade heroin, is also provided under strict medical supervision for people with severe addiction and ineffective other treatments. He mentioned Switzerland mainly to answer Jiang Wanan's question, is there such a system in the world? The answer is: yes. Is this "the government distributes drugs for everyone to take"? The answer is: no.
However, Zhang Jingsen emphasized that "Switzerland has this kind of system" and "what Shen Boyang advocated was the Swiss model" are completely different things. He never said, "What Shen Boyang advocates is Swiss medical heroin." Shen Boyang's proposition should be explained by Shen himself. Of course, Jiang Wanan can oppose the Swiss model. One can also criticize Shen Boyang’s 2014 proposition. You can even judge for yourself based on Shen Boyang's words whether he was talking about a system like Switzerland at that time. These can be debated. But we should not put words into his mouth that he has not said. Otherwise, we were originally discussing drug policy, but in the end we had to spend time clarifying whether the "Zhang Jingsen" in Jiang Wanan's mouth was Zhang Jingsen himself?
