Pubdate: Fri, 01 Sep 2006 Source: Bulletin, The (CN ON) Copyright: 2006 Community Bulletin Newspaper Group Inc. Contact: http://www.thebulletin.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/4263 Author: Alex MacLean Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction) HARM-REDUCTION IS TO REDUCE HARM, NOT ADDICTION The twilight of AIDS 2006 in Toronto would seem to be rather odd timing for Councilor Kyle Rae to retreat from his former position favouring safer drug use facilities in Toronto (based on the Vancouver and Hamburg models). Rae now says that such a program is unlikely to work here because our major illicit drug problem is crack cocaine, and that since, alas, there is no medical substitute for crack (as there is methadone for heroin) it would seem that, oh well, it just won't work here after all. Tellingly, he has peddled this spurious methadone excuse several times of lately, perhaps to avoid going to battle on these issues in the upcoming November election. But the much-vaunted successes of the Vancouver safe injection site model are not about getting heroin users into methadone maintenance. Vancouver's harm-reduction initiative is not reducing drug use, or weaning people off their addiction. A Simon Fraser University policy analysis by Bruce K. Alexander says that "there is no reason to think that the prevalence of addiction to drugs, alcohol or anything else has decreased" and that "there are continuing difficulties in attracting more than a minority of injection drugs users to methadone maintenance programs." What it has done, Alexander confirms, is reduce overdose deaths, new AIDS infections, street crime and discarded needles. This has won the support of some unlikely allies in Vancouver who have seen the reduction in the wide-open drug scene. So even if not curbing addiction, it is making it decidedly less of a public disorder and a health menace, a virtual textbook definition of harm reduction. The councilor may have his own reasons for the softening his earlier enthusiasm, and there are doubtless arguments to be made about why Vancouver's supervised injection site model won't work for crack in Toronto. The lack of a medical substitute isn't and shouldn't be claimed to be one of them. Alex MacLean - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D