Pubdate: Sat, 8 Dec 2007
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2007 The Ottawa Citizen
Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Margret Kopala, The Ottawa Citizen
Note: Margret Kopala's column on western perspectives appears every 
other week.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/opinion.htm (Opinion)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Downtown+Eastside
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?199 (Mandatory Minimum Sentencing)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Insite (Insite)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites)

REVOKE THIS LICENCE TO ENABLE

The First Step to Cleaning Up Canada's Worst Neighbourhood Is to 
Scrap Its Abhorrent Safe Injection Site

Don't call Al Arsenault unless you are prepared to interrupt an 
awards ceremony. I recently tried but the retired constable was in 
Victoria receiving two meritorious service awards from British 
Columbia's lieutenant governor.

The first was awarded to Sgt. Toby Hinton, Sgt. Tim Shields (RCMP) 
and Arsenault for a short documentary about car theft.

The second recognized Arsenault's work as a decoy in capturing thugs 
beating up the elderly and helpless in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. 
Barely a month earlier, their company, Odd Squad Productions, had won 
the Excellence in Cinema for a Feature Film award at the New York 
Independent Film and Video Festival, this time for their most recent 
production, Tears For April: Beyond the Blue Lens.

For Al Arsenault, these awards are the culmination of 26 years being 
a beat cop in Canada's poorest, most drug-infested neighbourhood. The 
10 most recent years have been focused on making educational films 
about its squalid underside.

Like other Odd Squad productions, Tears for April is a matter-of-fact 
yet deeply affecting feature documentary about the lives of several 
addicts on Vancouver's Skid Row, with April Reoch as its tragic 
heroine writ large.

The young, part-native addict is already a mother and into drugs when 
she arrives on the skids at the age of 17. Despite efforts at 
recovery, she remains there in a downward spiral of prostitution and 
drug addiction for the rest of her brief life.

Beyond the foul language, weeping sores, broken teeth and needle 
marked body, the film reveals the addict's few shreds of dignity. 
April could have been your sister or mine.

The documentary was snubbed by the Vancouver Film Festival because, 
according to Arsenault, "They prefer ideology over art." New York 
picked it up but then, unlike Vancouver where decriminalization and 
harm reduction are the prevailing orthodoxies, New York gets it. 
According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health published in 
September, illicit drug use in the United States among 12- to 
17-year- olds has declined.

Notably, use of the initiator drug marijuana by adolescent boys is 
down by 25 per cent. This is good news for the United States because, 
as the director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, John 
P. Walters reminds us, "We know that if people don't start using 
drugs during their teen years, they are very unlikely to go on to 
develop drug problems later in life." America is getting the message 
and so too is Britain where new laws allowing police to seize drugs 
and issue warnings have expedited case disposal and, according to BBC 
News, brought drug use to its "lowest in a decade." Then there's 
Sweden whose successes toward the goal of a drug-free society have 
been achieved in part by controversial policies such as compulsory treatment.

In Canada where marijuana use among youth is highest in the 
industrial world and consumption of other drugs isn't far behind, the 
Harper government's recently announced National Anti Drug Strategy is 
a promising start toward getting Canada back on the road to 
prevention, treatment and enforcement.

If the anti-drug budget is augmented by clearly articulated goals and 
a strategy for achieving them, results could soon appear.

As these unfold, mandatory minimum sentences and drug courts will 
affirm that possession and dealing are against the law, something 
even judges like Justice John Gomery seem to have forgotten.

Canada's National Anti-Drug Strategy makes no concessions to harm 
reduction or decriminalization measures.

Nonetheless, its biggest problem will be the decriminalizers and harm 
reduction crowd who have bogged the country down in controversial 
practices involving needle exchanges, crack pipes and safe injections 
even though consultation with an experienced organization like 
Alcoholics Anonymous would have quickly revealed that such practices 
merely enable the addict.

The epicentre of this approach to drug addiction is Vancouver. Here, 
opposition to harm reduction practices and safe injection facilities 
like the Downtown Eastside's Insite is routinely squashed, ignored or 
lambasted, though an observation that Insite seemed tantamount to 
"state assisted suicide" did manage to make it into the local press 
- -- not least because it was made by American broadcaster Dan Rather 
who was in town scouting out a TV special on the Vancouver Olympics.

The drug-addled stink that will rise from this issue during the 2010 
Winter Olympics should alone give pause to reconsider Insite though, 
to thoroughly mix the metaphor, fur has already flown over its 
future. Contrary to the findings of University of British Columbia 
studies extolling Insite's benefits, a paper published earlier this 
year by the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice challenges the 
harm reduction approach to drug addiction on both theoretical and 
practical grounds. "A Critique of Canada's INSITE Injection Site and 
its Parent Philosophy" by Colin Mangham argues the facility has 
achieved few or no reductions in the transmission of blood-borne 
diseases, no impact on overdose deaths, and that the facility is used 
only sporadically. Any reduction in public disorder, says the 20-year 
veteran in the drug prevention field, resulted from the injection of 
60 police officers into the area when the facility opened, not safe 
injections at Insite.

Moreover, while the harm reduction lobby takes us on wild goose 
chases, the really important stuff -- the need to reduce drug use 
through prevention, help addicts through treatment, and reduce drug 
availability through law enforcement -- is marginalized even though 
in the cases of tobacco and alcohol, such approaches have had 
considerable impact.

Mangham's analysis of the harm reduction phenomenon is particularly 
important. As manifest in the agencies, bureaucracies and the many 
politicians that surround all levels of government today, he says it 
is "a (libertarian) ideology viewing drug use not only as inevitable, 
but as simply a lifestyle option, a pleasure to be pursued, even a 
human right ... (it believes) others should only be there to help 
reduce the consequences of your choice until if or when you choose to 
choose differently." Or, as Al Arsenault recently told the Province, 
"... a person can have one foot in the ditch and another in the grave 
and they go, 'Oh, I don't want to be judgmental, here's your box of 
needles.'" Yet few seem to have considered that others might have 
something to say about an ideology that relieves the user of any 
personal responsibility, destroys families and communities, costs 
taxpayers money, and is now spilling into other formerly taboo 
"lifestyle" choices.

Think prostitution, for instance, where the term "sex-trade worker" 
is a step toward its normalization and ultimate legalization. 
Similarly, harm reduction is also a first step toward full 
legalization of drugs.

Even so, Mangham was pilloried in the west coast press though for 
anyone concerned about this issue, his paper is required reading.

Presumably exhausted by this battle of the experts versus front line 
workers like Mangham and Arsenault, few now are challenging Simon 
Fraser's Garth Davies whose paper "A Critical Evaluation of the 
Effects of Safe Injection Facilities" gathers data about safe 
injection sites from around the world and concludes "none of the 
(positive) impacts attributed ... can be unambiguously verified." 
And, certainly, no safe injection facility could have saved April 
Reoch, whose violent, banal and senseless death arrived not at the 
end of a needle, nor even at the hand of a john but as a bit of 
refuse on the garbage heap of humanity's lifestyle choices.

Literally.

Whether it is an academy award for Tears for April or the 2010 
Olympics, the world will soon have a wide open window on Vancouver. 
What will it see? The festering eyesore of degraded humanity ripe for 
exploitation by the latest serial killer called the Downtown 
Eastside? Or a city where pushers and users are in treatment or in 
jail and whose youth are hip to the dangers of drugs?

Insite's licence to enable has been on life support since Canada's 
minister of health extended it last year but as a first step to 
cleaning up Al Arsenault's old beat, it's time to pull the plug. It's 
about the 14- year-olds, Minister Clement. The memory of April Reoch 
deserves better.
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake