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
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MAP posted-by: Jo-D