Pubdate: Wed, 31 May 2006
Source: North Shore News (CN BC)
Copyright: 2006 North Shore News
Contact:  http://www.nsnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311
Author: Wallace G. Craig, Contributing Writer

CANADA'S OPIATE HISTORY ENDS ON SKID ROAD

TWO hundred years after opium gave birth to morphine,  the misery and 
squalor of addiction to opiates and  other illicit drugs is gathering 
momentum; aided and  abetted by a host of self-accredited and 
self-serving  21st century hedonists and amoral technocrats 
advocating decriminalization.

Some history may explain our sorry state.

For more than 2,500 years the poppy, Papaver  somniferum, has been 
valued for its sap, which in its  dried state is opium. A stimulant 
narcotic poison,  opium produces feelings of well being, 
hallucinations  and drowsiness, and for centuries was used in 
countless  medical potions as a cure for every real or imagined 
ailment, without any understanding of its active  ingredient. 
Isolated in a soluble crystallized state in  1805, morphine was not 
widely used until 1853 when  introduction of the hypodermic syringe 
enabled intravenous use. A quick fix bestowed powerful  physiological 
and psychic effects dwarfing those of  opium. Continued use produced 
overwhelming addiction;  an overdose, the likelihood of death.

In hospitals and on battlefields, pain-killing morphine  is a 
God-given miracle. Non-medical indulgence,  so-called recreational 
use, is a dropout's cop-out.

In late-19th-century British society, morphine became a  craze, 
craved by many upper-class matrons. It was  fashionable, lawful to 
possess, offered nirvana at the  price of addiction and guaranteed 
tragedy. Whatever  morphine did in transporting its users to a 
world  without pain, stress, time and mortality, opium's  grandchild, 
heroin, could do more but with greater  addiction. Heroin offered 
ultimate release from the  straitjacket of reality without revealing 
to the thrill-seeker or daredevil that very few intravenous  users 
ever escape life-threatening illness and disease  that accompanies 
compulsive uncontrolled use. The  coincident discovery of cocaine, an 
alkaloid of the  coca plant, completed this tragic narcotic trilogy.

Notwithstanding the absurdity of fervent romancing by a  few writers 
and poets of divine insights and heightened  intellect induced 
through smoking or eating opium, by  the end of the 19th century drug 
addiction stood naked,  offering only degradation, depravity and 
disrepute;  highlighted by many morphine-addicted high-society 
matrons who victimized their families as they slid into  suicidal 
self-indulgence.

In the mid-19th century, to its everlasting dishonour,  Britain 
engaged in two wars against China to force a  continuation of a 
legalized opium trade - bringing  about greater sales, ever-higher 
levels of addiction,  and leper-like suffering to chronic users.

Even so, at the dawning of the 20th century, Canadian  society 
remained impervious to the counter-culture of  drug addiction - with 
the exception of a few opium dens  in Vancouver's Chinatown and the 
lawful processing of  raw opium in Vancouver and Victoria for 
marketing in  the eastern United States.

Our tranquility ended in 1907 when racist white  citizens, angered 
over a perceived flood of Chinese  immigrants, rioted and destroyed 
much of Chinatown. In  the aftermath, Chinese property owners, 
including two  opium dealers, applied to Ottawa for compensation. The 
federal official investigating the riot was a young  Mackenzie King. 
King was so concerned over the  processing of opium in Canada that he 
persuaded the  federal government to legislate Canada's first 
narcotic law, the Opium Act of 1908. In 1911, it became the  Opium 
and other Drugs Act. At roughly the same time  Britain and the United 
States criminalized possession  and trafficking in opiates.

In the first 50 years of the 20th century the dynamics  of Canadian 
society were largely faith based - driven  by moral and ethical 
commitment to individual  principles and standards. Ordinary citizens 
understood  the paramount importance of values in families and 
communities and how these things translated into  cherished 
characteristics that gave rise to intense  pride in saying "I am a 
Canadian." And all of this was  forged in the adversity of two world 
wars and the Great  Depression. We did not accept or encourage the 
ultimate  self-indulgence of addiction to illicit drugs.

In his Nov. 24, 2004, North Shore News column, Jerry  Paradis wrote: 
". . . we - citizens, police, judges -  lived and worked within the 
orthodoxy that all drugs  are inherently evil (except, of course, 
alcohol) and  that prohibition and punishment can rid us of them . . 
. it is distressing to consider the evils we spawned in  our hopeless 
attempt to impose criminal sanctions for  private choices. . . .The 
inclination in humans . . .  to seek out mind-altering substances is innate."

A disposition, tendency, or propensity to use illicit  drugs involves 
thought processes that reject moral and  ethical considerations. To 
do the necessary preparation  for intravenous injection; to search 
out a suitable  vein; to insert a hypodermic syringe and complete the 
injection is an act of utmost selfishness and  self-justification. It 
is a chosen course of action  that cannot be exculpated by labelling 
it a private  choice. It is inherently evil.

I believe that decent hardworking Canadians would  reject any 
government that ended criminalization of  illicit drugs with a 
technocracy of "private choices."

The 1952 Report on Criminal Offences in Canada cited  367 convictions 
under the Opium and Narcotic Drugs Act  - 254 of them recorded in 
British Columbia, with 245 of  the 254 occurring in Vancouver. The 
Vancouver Police  Department estimated that between 1,500 and 2,000 
addicts were in British Columbia, nearly all of them in  Vancouver.

On Dec. 5, 2004, Daphne Bramham reported in the  Vancouver Sun: "The 
Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse  estimates there are 15,000 
injection drug users in  Vancouver. . . ." Skid Road Vancouver is 
their mecca -  a hellhole that addicts control and rule by force 
and  intimidation while they go about socializing, selling  stolen 
property, and trafficking in illicit drugs.  Addicts are a menace to 
residents and merchants of  Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.

Since the 1960s, wave after wave of young people have  been 
confronted with an array of drugs beyond heroin  and cocaine, a 
smorgasbord with adult-pacifier  marijuana at one end and 
hallucinatory LSD at the other. More recently, the party drug 
ecstasy, and  addictive and dangerous amphetamines have been added 
to  the menu.

It seems indisputable that the dynamics of Canadian  society changed 
in the '60s: We adapted to greater  individual liberty and a healthy 
sub-culture of  non-conformism, beset with a ride-along subset of 
parasitical drug addicts; an increasingly elitist and  condescending 
judiciary constantly straying away from  strictness and moral 
uprightness in the imposition of  punishment; a penitentiary system 
philosophically  opposed to making jail-time, hard time.

Too many people today fail to appreciate the vitally  important 
philosophical distinction between the  concepts of freedom and 
licence. The former requires  self-discipline ingrained with a sense 
of duty, whereas  the latter translates into excessive liberty of 
action  guided by egocentric disregard for law and propriety. 
Licentiousness is characterized by Edmund Burke's maxim  "Intemperate 
mankind can never be free; for by their  appetites they forge their 
fetters." Words that aptly  describe drug addicts.

In place of criminalization we are being pressured to  accept a 
prescriptive regulatory system for the  distribution of illicit 
drugs; a tightly controlled  technocracy touted by the Health 
Officers Council of  B.C., a registered society of "public health physicians."

If legalization ever becomes a reality you can bet your  bottom 
dollar it will blossom into full-blown  bureaucratic absolutism 
opening the floodgates to  unlimited substitution therapy with 
methadone and other synthetic narcotics, safe injection sites for 
every  disorderly congregation of addicts, endless  prescription 
trials of narcotics, and seamless  epidemiological studies.

The resulting ideological maelstrom will require large  numbers of 
quasi-judicial officers, absolutist  bureaucrats, topped off with 
academics pressing on with  every manner of abstruse conclusions in 
attempting to  prove addiction is a disease and that addicts are 
victims of themselves. And all the while these virtuosi  will be 
spinning around in committees, conferences and  public relations 
without any sense of the urgency to  bring about withdrawal and 
abstinence by their  essential laboratory addicts, dehumanized into 
virtual  lab rats.

I leave you with a glimpse into the point of view of  British prison 
doctor Anthony Daniels, who writes under  the pen name of Theodore 
Dalrymple. In his most recent  book, Romancing Opiates - 
Pharmacological Lies and the  Addiction Bureaucracy, he writes: 
"Contrary to our  current pieties, therefore, which give those who 
subscribe to them a comfortable warm glow of generosity  of spirit, 
but which are actually dehumanizing because  they reduce addicts to 
the status of mere physiological  specimens or preparations in a 
laboratory, addiction is  a moral weakness par excellence."

In my next column I intend to challenge the ongoing de  facto 
solution to addiction being carried out by the  Vancouver Coastal 
Health Authority. And I'll give you  more of Dr. Daniels coupled with 
the opinions of a  policeman who went beyond the call of duty in 
working his entire career on the skids in Vancouver.
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MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman