Arthur Salm is an SDNN columnist.

The city of San Diego wants kids to use intravenous drugs. To make it easy for them, free needles are dispensed twice a week.

“I think the free needle program particularly sends the right message to our kids,” said Mayor Jerry Sanders. “It sends a message that as city government, by giving out clean needles for illegal drug use, that we condone illegal drug use. And we do. And it’s right.”

Before the attorneys tool up and the lawsuits have actually been filed, let me state that of course Mayor of Jerry Sanders of San Diego did not say that, or anything like it. But Dianne Jacob, who chairs the San Diego County Board of Supervisors, has implied that that’s where Sanders’ heart lies. Because here’s Jacob explaining why the supervisors oppose the needle exchange program (for the fake Sanders quote above, I just changed a few words):

“I think it particularly sends a wrong message to our kids. It sends a message to our kids that as county government, if we gave out clean needles for illegal drug use, that we condone illegal drug use. And we don’t. And it’s wrong.”

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There’s no other way to parse it: In Jacob’s view, Sanders and his fellow pushers on the San Diego City Council — we could be kind and call them “enablers,” but we’re in a (drug) war, so no bombast barred - believe that it’s just fine if kids shoot up.  After all, a needle-exchange program is permitted in San Diego; the council is clearly pro-heroin.

Yesterday, in the third of his four-part series on Hepatitis C, KPBS-FM’s Kenny Goldberg pointed out that “People who inject illegal drugs are at highest risk of spreading hepatitis C, H-I-V, and other bloodborne diseases. To reduce that threat, communities all across the country have launched clean syringe exchange programs.” Goldberg cited a 2004 SANDAG study, which found that “clients who visited the exchange were much less likely to share a needle. They also reduced their drug use. In fact, one in five clients said they had entered treatment.”

There followed a remarkable statement: “Jacob doesn’t believe it.”

Goldberg quoted Jacob as saying that she “thinks” there’s research on both sides of the issue, something Steffanie Strathdee, head of the division of global public health at the UCSD School of Medicine, called patently false.

“I’ve been working in this field now for more than 20 years,” Strathdee told Goldberg, “and I can tell you that there’s no scientific evidence that shows that needle exchange causes harm.”

But Jacob and her fellow supervisors prefer what Steven Colbert would likely call the “truthiness” of needle-exchange programs encouraging drug use. Pushy, in-your-face facts get in the way of the supervisors’ anti-drug bluster, so they’re dismissed (”Jacob doesn’t believe it”) and escorted from the chambers.

Goldberg then elicited from Jacob even more remarkable statement. He asked her, “What kind of information might make you reconsider your view on this whole matter?” to which she replied, “I’m not sure any kind of information will, frankly. Because of the fact that philosophically, I believe it’s wrong to in any way to encourage drug use. I think it’s wrong to government to send that message.”

The magnitude of the obtuseness, rigidity — say it! — stupidity of that statement is breathtaking. It recalls the classic from former congressman Earl F. Landgrebe (R-Indiana), who, even when confronted with the cascading, irrefutable evidence of President Richard Nixon’s perfidy in the Watergate scandal, continued to defend him. “Don’t confuse me with facts,” Landgrebe intoned, “I have a closed mind.”

The supervisors’ position would be bolstered if, out of all the intravenous drug users in San Diego County, they could come up with one individual who, dragged into a meeting of the Board of Supervisors, in public, for all the county to see, would declare something like, “Yeah, I was pretty much anti-drug until I heard about the needle-exchange program. I thought, ‘Whoa - free needles! That must mean the city council says it’s okay to mainline! Guess all that other stuff I’ve been hearing all my life was wrong. Sign me up!’ ”

To which you’d have to assign to the supervisors a certain amount of credit for finding without a doubt the dumbest individual in Southern California, because every other individual in Southern California, and probably the northern hemisphere, and for that matter, the southern hemisphere, knows damn well that communities dispense free needles to help prevent the spread of disease, not because communities want to encourage drug use. That one imaginary person at the imaginary supervisors meeting is imaginary because no such person exists.

Someone once accused the great economist John Maynard Keynes of inconsistency. “When I get new information, I change my position,” Keynes replied. “What, sir, do you do with new information?”

We know Dianne Jacob’s answer to that one.