Pubdate: Wed, 14 Dec 2005 Source: North Shore News (CN BC) Copyright: 2005 North Shore News Contact: http://www.nsnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311 Author: Wallace G. Craig, Contributing Writer Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?136 (Methadone) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Safe Injecting Rooms) DRUG REGULATION IS A SLIPPERY SLOPE TO HELL THE DISGRACE of unrestrained addiction and squalor in Skid Road Vancouver is a threat to the health and peace of North and West Vancouver; whatever it takes, whatever it costs, we owe it to our children and elders to keep it out of our community. To begin: a variation on Byron. Through life's skid road, so dim and dirty, I have drugged myself to three-and-thirty, What have these years left to me? Nothing! Except thirty-three! I was a studio-guest on the Bill Good Show of Nov. 30, along with Ann Livingston, a spokeswoman for the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users, and, by telephone, Professor Bernard Harcourt, a law professor at the University of Chicago. We discussed a recent police crackdown on tawdry public disorder in Skid Road by injection drug addicts. In a public statement announcing the crackdown, Vancouver police Insp. Bob Rolls stated that it was "to target the users who are creating street disorder, who are in close distance to the supervised injection site and who are refusing to use that facility." On behalf of the network, Livingston expressed outrage at the police action and, in her closing comment, said, "We need to boldly implement programs and see if it (the safe infection site) works. . . there aren't enough safe injection sites - we need four or five more sites - four or five blocks apart. . . ." My angry response: "Well, if we have four or five more you can write off Skid Road - it will become, in truth, . . . a road to hell. And the notion that there are people down there who don't deserve the police being around them - that's false. The Downtown Eastside is the last resort of people who need low-cost housing. There are probably 16,000 decent people down there. They can't go anywhere else and they need the protection of the police." And last to speak, an outraged caller identified only as Ray. "I get tired of listening to these bleeding hearts get on and do all their yattering about what drug addicts need and don't need. Most of these people . . . really don't want help anyway. . . . And when they do have the opportunity they won't take advantage of it. "I've got family members who've been involved in drugs for 20 years. I've talked to them endlessly because I've been involved in these drug programs myself over the years and I've found that they really don't want help; all they want is drugs and whatever else is free that's going with it. "And people like myself that are diabetic and need drugs that will help diabetes - you can't get it free because the government won't pay for it. But they are ready, willing and able to lump just about anything they need down there on the Eastside for all these drug addicts that are running around the streets making Vancouver look like the lowlife capital of the world." Let me take you from Ray's common sense to a futuristic "public health approach" - an addict's utopia that excludes moral and ethical standards, and avoids vigorous intervention by detoxification, counselling and abstinence. On Oct. 19, I spent the day paying rapt attention to a group of proselytizers from around the world, figuratively beating drums and shaking tambourines to a refrain called a "shared vision of the future." They came to a symposium at Vancouver's Wosk Centre for Dialogue to praise Beyond Drug Prohibition - A Public Health Approach, a discussion paper produced by the Health Officers Council of British Columbia. The council is a registered society of "public health" physicians who want to tell us how to improve our health - in this instance Vancouver's chronic, confirmed and hardened drug addicts; and, of course, all dedicated recreational druggies. My fellow columnist, Jerry Paradis, a speaker at the symposium, gave high praise to the council paper in his commentary, A Global Perspective On Drugs, published by the North Shore News on Nov. 16. "At the core of the conference was a report by the Health Officers Council. Theirs was a succinct, well-written argument, supported by extensive research that sets out all of the grounds for the establishment of a system of legalization and regulation of psychoactive drugs." I recoil from his assessment and, to the contrary, find the health officers' document to be unsound, implausible and characterized by misleading and specious reasoning. In a nutshell the council is saying: Don't worry folks, we'll do your thinking for you. Just decriminalize illicit drugs and let Big Brother control drug addicts through regulation. Chafing at the hindrance of the criminal status of illicit drugs, the authors of the discussion paper advocate production and availability of drugs in a "tightly" controlled system in a "tight" regulatory framework. "This would move individual harmful illegal drug use from being primarily a criminal issue (the council calls it a failed criminal prohibition approach) to being primarily a health issue." To give credence to a move to regulation of drugs, the council insists upon the use of "illegal" rather than the broader term "illicit." "Illicit" was anathema to the council's purpose for the reason that "it can be used to describe prohibition based on cultural norms and values other than law, and suggests a moral or social as opposed to legal rationale for prohibition." The discussion paper pointedly avoids the greater harm that regulation will create for juveniles. Yet these doctors must know that there will be a significant number of kids who will venture into the adult drug subculture of stupefaction or hyperactive behaviour; a sinister and potentially lethal world where they will end up in the sleazy grip of lowlife black marketeers. When you prick the conscience of an advocate of regulation he/she will admit that a black market and organized crime will not be eradicated by decriminalization. This certainly is the case in a parallel paper, Preventing Harm from Psychoactive Substance Use, published by the City of Vancouver in June. The city's bureaucrats recommend a cautious approach to regulation, one drug at a time, accepting that "the black market could be significantly reduced but realistically will not be curtailed and will continue to be a source of harm to individuals and communities," and that "concern will arise that removing prohibition will 'send the wrong message, particularly to youth.'" The health officers would have you believe that every addict has an absolute right to use psychoactive substances. Autonomy, self-determination as the council puts it, would prevail subject only to regulation. Addiction, a criminal malady of depravity, would be destigmatized and regarded as a benign illness, resolved, when use becomes abuse, by a Big Brother health authority. Addicts become clients - not patients and certainly not criminals - to be guided along a path of continuing dependence on drugs through injection sites, opiate prescription and methadone treatment. As in an Orwellian laboratory they will become grist for epidemiological cohorts, be made the subject of theories, techniques and methods, and they will be memorialized in pseudo-academic reports and requests for continuing and increasing government funding of a regulatory albatross - - inimical to and the antithesis of a decent society. A druggie's narcissistic right - to be and continue to be an addict - will be enshrined in his/her autonomy (self determination) under Principles of a Public Health Approach. Direct action through detoxification and abstinence - unreliable as too primitive and unscientific - will be a mere sidebar in this visionary scheme for a greater "just society." I hope that North and West Vancouverites will take a moral and ethical approach to the epidemic of addiction and reject the amoralist and rancid creed of absolutist regulation with its maze of bewildering pathways and blind alleys designed and operated by an all-knowing bureaucracy. - --- MAP posted-by: Richard Lake