Pubdate: Wed, 03 Mar 2004 Source: Vancouver Courier (CN BC) Copyright: 2004 Vancouver Courier Contact: http://www.vancourier.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/474 Author: David Carrigg Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange) SOUTH VAN NEEDS 24/7 HEALTH CENTRE TO FIGHT DRUG PROBLEM An emerging health crisis in South Vancouver needs immediate attention, says the South Vancouver Community Health Society. Bert Massiah, spokesman for the society, said a combination of soaring drug abuse and South Vancouver's demographics is a recipe for disaster. The area has more single parents, children and youth, youths not in school, married couples with three or more children and non-English-speaking residents than any other part of Vancouver. Massiah said his group has been lobbying the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority for the past three years to establish a 24-hour health contact centre in South Vancouver. Currently, South Vancouver only has a health office, which is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., five days a week. Massiah said the South Vancouver Community Health Society wants the city and health authority to create a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week health centre in the new Sunset Community Centre, where needles and condoms would be dispensed. "South Vancouver is such a traditional community and there is a lot of opposition. The concern is drugs and all these horrible people," he said. "That's why I remind people any chance I get that less than 10 per cent of the young people in the Downtown Eastside were born there. The rest came from places like South Vancouver." Massiah said South Vancouver community groups began to notice an increase in open drug use and prostitution in their neighbourhood about three years ago. "What triggered it is they found some needles on the grounds of the Salvation Army care home in 2001. The executive director at the time was a member of the health board's advisory committee and he came to us and said 'Look what I've found'," Massiah said. "We talked to some of the business people on Fraser and they said they were seeing more needles in the back alleys. We did more asking around and began seeing there were real problems emerging." In response, the South Vancouver Community Health Society contacted Art Steinmann, a consultant and former head of the provincial government's Alcohol and Drug Education Service, to help develop a pilot project to deal with drug abuse. Last month, the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority agreed to fund the first phase of the project, which will cost $20,000 and involves creating an advisory committee, conducting research in the community and determining the feasibility of a second phase. If phase two is approved by the health authority, at a cost of $46,000, a key goal of the nine-month project will be to provide drug abuse prevention information to grandparents of immigrant families. Massiah said grandparents are often left to raise children in immigrant families where both parents work. As those children move from elementary to high school, they face pressure to use alcohol and drugs. "The parents are often working hard to establish themselves in the country and a lot of kids are raised by grandparents and often English is a second language in the home. We have to reach out to those adults." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom