Pubdate: Fri, 21 Jul 2000
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: The Vancouver Sun 2000
Contact:  200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3
Fax: (604) 605-2323
Website: http://www.vancouversun.com/
Author: Chris Nuttall-Smith

B.C.'S CHIEF CORONER CALLS IT QUITS

After 20 Years Probing Deaths, Larry Campbell Leaving 'On Top'

On the wall of his Burnaby office, the province's chief coroner keeps a 
black and white picture of the old Larry Campbell, wearing an RCMP hockey 
jersey and the heavy-jawed grin of a street-toughened drug cop.

Two decades after he left the Mounties for the B.C.'s coroner's service 
most people know Larry Campbell for the battles he has fought on behalf of 
those on the wrong side of the law.

But now, after 20 years of investigating deaths and recommending how to 
prevent them, Chief Coroner Larry Campbell says he has done all he can.

In an exclusive interview Thursday with The Vancouver Sun, Campbell, 52, 
said he has tendered his resignation to the attorney-general's office.

He will clean out his desk Sept. 29.

"I'm leaving when I'm on top," Campbell said, smiling broadly, his 
tasselled loafers propped up on his desk. "I'm happy with my job, I'm happy 
what's been done."

"Twenty years is a long time to do death investigations."

Campbell joined the coroner's service in Vancouver in 1981 and worked in 
Yellowknife and the Yukon Territories before returning as the Vancouver 
regional coroner. He worked in that position until 1996, when he replaced 
Vince Cain as chief coroner.

In those 20 years he has seen thousands of bodies. He has held inquiries 
into traffic deaths and railway accidents, assisted suicide and the deaths 
of prisoners and children.

(continued on page A2)

B.C.'s war on drugs 'isn't working'

Since 1998, he has worked as a technical advisor and sometime script-writer 
for Da Vinci's Inquest, the CBC television drama about a fictional 
Vancouver coroner, and he keeps the odd script, marked with yellow sticky 
notes, lying around his office.

But on one issue in particular, Campbell has always led with his heart: he 
has been an advocate for the Downtown Eastside and the hundreds of drug 
users who die there, needlessly, every year.

"It is time for not only the police but the public to come to grips with 
this war on drugs," he famously instructed a coroner's jury into an 
overdose death in 1993.

"At what cost - not only in time, effort, money and lives - is the war 
being played out?"

He sits on the board of Triage, a group that works to shelter the people 
who are hardest to house, and just this week, in an event he says would 
have been unimaginable just five eyars ago, he umpired The Street Vs. The 
Heat softball game between Vancouver drug addicts and Vancouver police 
officers.

"These are the people who are at the very, very bottom of society's 
screen," he said Thursday.

"I'm not some nutcase from the far left.  I'm just pragmatic about the 
whole thing that [the war on drugs] isn't working."

His argument, for example, in favour of a safe injection site for addicts 
has been a non-starter with Allan Rock, the federal justice minister.  And 
this June, Campbell announced that drug overdose deaths were up 30 per cent 
from 1999.

Still, Campbell insists, he is happy with what he's done.  He cites the 
softball game and needle exchange programs and plans to build a resource 
centre where addicts can use a telephone, sit down, do their laundry and 
get access to services.

A spokesman for Attorney-General Andrew Petter said in a prepared statement 
from the minister Thursday he's sad to see Campbell leaving.

"Larry has done an excellent job as chief coroner and he will be missed 
both within the ministry, but also within our community.  He's been a 
strong and forceful advocate on a number of issues."

Campbell's contract, renewed last year, was to continue to 2002. Campbell 
said.  He insisted, though, that he is leaving on good terms and that he is 
satisfied with governments' response to his recommendations.

"We do about 2,000 recommendations a year and somewhere like 75 per cent of 
those are done.

"The other 25 per cent, probably a portion is not practical.  Another 
portion is too expensive.

"The others - the ones that really worry me - are where they're willing to 
take the risk that it's not going to happen again."

Campbell is married and has a 10-year-old son.  And alongside the hockey 
photo he keeps pictures of his other pursuits, like the one where he's 
struggling with a 175-pound halibut.

His e-mail address begins with iflyfish and he wears a gold logo of the 
Gemini Awards, for which he was nominated for his scriptwriting on Da 
Vinci's Inquest, in his lapel.

A few weeks ago, Campbell was in Iqaluit, consulting on how to set up a 
coroner's service, and he hopes to continue both the consulting, and the 
script writing.

He chuckled and pulled nervously at his ear when asked how he has changed 
in 20 years.

"I went from somebody who was not really involved," he said.  "I really 
wasn't involved in what was going on in my world."

Campbell paused, then he didn't finish the thought.

Maybe he didn't have to.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart