Pubdate: Mon, 17 Oct 2005
Source: Toronto Star (CN ON)
Copyright: 2005 The Toronto Star
Contact:  http://www.thestar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/456
Author: Rosie Dimanno
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/coke.htm (Cocaine)

WHY WON'T CITY STIGMATIZE CRACKHEADS?

But Smokers Seen As Social Pariahs, Public Health Risk

New Drug Strategy Eschews Term 'Drug Abuse' As Pejorative

So let me get this straight: I can't smoke cigarettes in Toronto but I can 
smoke crack?

The former is a public health risk, nipped in the butt at nearly every 
indoor venue, with bossy and vilifying interdiction campaigns that have 
transformed smokers into social pariahs. But the latter is a personal 
choice that ought not to be stigmatized by a judgmental society.

I am not making this up. I am merely taking to their presumptive 
conclusions some of the recommendations advanced in a drug strategy scheme 
unveiled at city hall on Friday.

So very non-condemnatory of drug use is the report by the Toronto Drug 
Strategy Advisory Committee that its members have quite deliberately 
eschewed even the term "drug abuse" as inherently pejorative. The word 
"abuse," the report states upfront, "perpetuates social stigma and judgment 
which can marginalize and alienate people from the very supports they need."

These supports could, come the day, include "supervised injection sites or 
inhalation rooms" in Toronto -- inhalation rooms because crack cocaine is 
the most frequently used street drug in this city -- as posited by 
Recommendation No. 55. That recommendation does not overtly call for the 
establishment of such 100 per cent toleration zones. It merely asks the 
city, in partnership with the Centre for Addiction & Mental Health and 
community groups, to further study that option in developing strategies to 
address the "stigma and discrimination toward people who use substances."

The report's authors do acknowledge that supervised consumption sites -- a 
50-cent euphemism for what most of us would call a crack house -- would 
provoke tremendous controversy, as indeed the matter did, does, within the 
committee's own membership. Clearly, there was not enough agreement from 
within its ranks to make a bold, unambiguous proposal. But it's just as 
clear, from reading this section, that the committee wants to venture 
further in the direction of what I can only describe as legal crack 
arcades, which can only be created, in this country, after obtaining formal 
exclusion under the federal Controlled Drugs and Substances Act.

It's been done already in some 50 jurisdictions around the world, and, as 
of this past July, in Vancouver, where the issue is heroin rather than crack.

It is not that I wish to see drug addicts busted, because the last thing a 
crackhead needs is the burden of a criminal record, or incarceration in 
penal institutions where drugs are so easily obtained. There was a time 
when I believed that decriminalizing all drug use was the wisest approach 
- -- treating abuse as a health issue, not a matter for law enforcement. But 
I was taken aback, on my last trip to Amsterdam -- where soft drugs are 
legal, marijuana and hash for sale in drug cafes -- at how very stupid much 
of the mellowed-out adult populace had become, so sluggish, slack, 
slothful. The potency of these "soft drugs" has increased dramatically, as 
laced as they are with THC.

This is not your father's ganja, as I discovered while on assignment for a 
story about legalizing drugs. (It took me three days to recover from my 
"research" and I may very well be the only Canadian reporter who has 
charged spliffs and hash brownies to her expense account.)

Further, despite assurances that this wouldn't occur, the use of hard drugs 
in Amsterdam has skyrocketed, the city crawling with wasted junkies.

There are compelling social reasons, I now concede, for rejecting the whole 
premise of legalizing drugs as the lesser of two evils. And, as Toronto 
Police Chief Bill Blair noted last week -- he is utterly opposed to the 
notion of crack sanctuaries -- no one in this country gets charged for 
possession of small amounts of marijuana and hash any more. The personal 
use rule of thumb is being respected, largely because police forces have 
bigger drug problems to deal with, particularly the gun violence and 
organized crime that is driven by the drug appetite.

It is troubling that the drug advisory committee pays minimal attention to 
that drug-perpetuated violence in Toronto, especially after the lethal 
summer we've just been through. Or frames it within the context of how 
neighbourhoods could be made safer if some of this activity was more 
properly supervised -- yes, even in a smoke-up drop-in environment, 
envisioned as a one-stop shopping emporium where addicts could also obtain 
clean needles and condoms and counselling, provided that counselling was 
non-invasive and moral-neutral.

"Effective harm reduction approaches are pro-active, offer a comprehensive 
range of coordinated, user-friendly, client-centered and flexible problems 
and services and provide a supportive, non-judgmental environment."

The report does make many sound recommendations -- from providing better 
addiction services in prisons to reinstating addiction as an eligible 
disability under the Ontario Disability Support Program -- even if this 
does all boil down to a great deal more public money spent on intervention 
and the mushrooming of the anti-drug bureaucracy, indeed with the added 
creation of a new drug secretariat for Toronto.

But it's the tone of the thing that I find most objectionable -- the de 
facto premise that our society has no right to project any judgmental 
values because, if you follow this logic, it's this very disapproval that 
prevents addicts from straightening out.

I would think it's the other way around. Making it easier to obtain and use 
crack, for instance (which, unlike heroin, doesn't involve the shared use 
of flesh-piercing implements that spread HIV and Hepatitis C), would not 
discourage such ruinous drug use. Rather, the message would seem to be that 
we, as a community, are prepared to facilitate your drug problem.

It's perfectly reasonable for any society to express its opprobrium for a 
drug scourge that makes victims of us all, be it the destruction of 
residential neighbourhoods or by wayward bullets that strike children.

And it's hypocritical to say that public revulsion is counter-effective in 
stigmatizing drug abuse when these are the very same people -- check the 
public health authorities involved in preparing the report -- who 
sanctioned such bullying tactics against smokers, and who claim their 
campaign has been marvellously effective.

Sorry, you can't have it both ways.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom