Pubdate: Mon, 15 Jan 2001
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2001 The Vancouver Sun
Contact:  200 Granville Street, Ste.#1, Vancouver BC V6C 3N3
Fax: (604) 605-2323
Website: http://www.vancouversun.com/
Author: Carellin Brooks

A SAD, IRONIC LESSON ABOUT DRUG ABUSE

Barry Schneider died in November to not much fanfare, but the
Courtenay RCMP officer's demise received new scrutiny in early January
with the release of a report showing he died not naturally, as most
people had assumed, but of an overdose of cocaine and heroin.

I'm willing to bet that those revelations were an occasion for both
consternation and a perverse kind of pleasure.

Consternation from the people, like Schneider's colleagues on the
police force, who never would have thought of the drug-awareness
coordinator as a drug user himself.

And the pleasure, not at his death but that his secret came out, from
those folks, like harm-reduction advocates and the addicts Schneider
busted, who always suspected the line between the dos and the do-nots
was more permeable than it's usually portrayed.

Schneider's real story -- whether he was a chronic drug user or a new
one, how he got his drugs and why he did them, and if his overdose was
really accidental -- will probably never become public.

No doubt there are people who know, and no doubt those people are
keeping their mouths shut.

But let's assume, for the sake of argument and because it's the most
likely scenario, that the constable was a regular consumer of the two
drugs in question.

Not only is this what probably happened, it's what most people no
doubt find the most uncomfortable possibility. Why? Because Schneider
didn't fit the profile of the typical addict. He was a respected
officer, successful in his job and liked in the community. Someone
others trusted to do the right thing.

That he could lead the kind of high-profile anti-drug crusades he did,
and still be a user himself, is the kind of conundrum that makes a lot
of people, well, squirm.

As they should. The fact that a respected officer of the law, one who
regularly lectured at schools and groups on the evils of drug use,
could also use drugs should raise some troubling questions.

What it shouldn't do, however, is tempt us to believe we can impose a
quick fix on clandestine drug use by people in positions like
Schneider's.  One senior RCMP officer has already fallen into this
trap, suggesting mandatory drug testing for police officers.

Drug testing may be a routine matter in some parts of the United
States, but as should be very clear by now, that country's strictly
law-and-order approach to drugs doesn't work. It infringes more
closely on civil liberties than I suspect we'd be comfortable with.

The by-the-book approach ignores the reasons that people turn to drugs
in the first place.

Knowing as little as we do of Schneider's story, it's hard to say why
or when he turned to drugs. But what the possibility of an RCMP
officer on drugs should tell us is that the picture of drug use is
more complex than we're used to seeing.

Sure, there are the down-and-outs shooting up in alleyways and the
chronic thieves who commit hundreds of break-ins to support their habits.

But there are the other drug users, the folks who look just like you.
They do their jobs quietly and competently, drive home to their nice
places, and shut their doors. Then they shoot up or snort or get high.
Are these people really a drain on society simply because they do drugs?

It could be argued that Schneider's case is particularly problematic
because in doing drugs (at least once that we know of), he had to
break the laws he was charged with enforcing. But maybe it points to a
flaw in our laws, not a need for a crackdown.

The question is: If people can take drugs in a fashion that causes no
detriment to anyone else (except that they support the necessary
blight imposed by our haphazard criminalization of dealers and
suchlike), is that drug use so bad?

Sure, Schneider's death was a blow to his family and his community,
and that death was directly caused by drugs. But the officer's
coronary disease was so advanced that the coroner first mistook it for
the cause of death, meaning that his heart might have killed him at
any time anyway.

The fact remains that until the time of his death, Schneider did an
exemplary job as an RCMP officer, as his shocked colleagues attested.

It's ironic that the policeman, who took pains to point out the harm
caused by middle-class, behind-closed-doors drug use, should turn out
to be the poster boy for just the opposite moral: that drugs, used the
way he used them, really cause very little harm at all.
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