Pubdate: Thu, 20 Dec 2007
Source: Georgia Straight, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2007 The Georgia Straight
Contact:  http://www.straight.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1084
Author: Pieta Woolley
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/Insite (Insite)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/people/Stephen+Harper ora

JESUS LOVES HARM REDUCTION, BUT STEPHEN HARPER DOESN'T

The province's top public-health doctor has slammed Prime Minister 
Stephen Harper for creating a $64-million drug strategy based on 
ideology rather than reason. The National Anti-Drug Strategy, 
announced by Harper on October 4, is heavy on enforcement and 
includes treatment and prevention, but it leaves out harm reduction, 
which is controversial among some Christians.

"There's so much evidence supporting harm reduction internationally 
that to ignore the evidence is evidence of blinkered thinking," 
provincial health officer Perry Kendall told the Georgia Straight in 
a phone interview from Victoria on December 17. "This [dropping harm 
reduction] was done without consultation with any of the provinces or 
territories or the people who have been working for 10 years on 
Canada's Drug Strategy. Harper is using old 'war on drugs' statements 
like 'The party's over,' which is dis-respectful of the expertise of 
all those who have worked on drug policies. It makes us sound like 
we're a bunch of dope smokers sitting around making decisions in some 
backroom."

Kendall pioneered harm-reduction strategies in Canada when he was 
Toronto's medical officer of health in the late 1980s. Now that all 
provinces and territories have some form of harm-reduction policy, 
Kendall said, he's mystified that Harper has ditched it. Insite, 
Vancouver's safe-injection site, is therefore at risk. Methadone 
programs and Vancouver's crack-paraphernalia-distribution program are 
both at risk as well, according to Kendall, as they require federal 
exemptions under Section 56 of the Controlled Drugs and Substances 
Act. In addition, Harper's stance makes vulnerable a proposal that 
B.C. provide slow-release amphetamines to crystal-meth addicts in a 
methadone-style program. The City of Victoria, too, plans to request 
an exemption for a safe-consumption site, he said. All peer-reviewed 
studies point to the effectiveness of harm reduction, Kendall added.

Meanwhile, the new strategy is couched in conservative Christian 
language. Leading the quasi-scientific anti-harm-reduction lobby in 
Canada is former B.C. Conservative MP Randy White. White, who grew up 
Anglican and attends Catholic services with his wife, is the 
president of Ottawa-based lobby group the Drug Prevention Network of 
Canada, which is against harm reduction. When Harper announced the 
new antidrug strategy, he did so from the Salvation Army in Winnipeg 
and thanked the Drug Prevention Network for participating in the 
day's events and discussions. In that speech, he referred directly to 
the Bible, noting that "the work you do embodies the spirit of the 
Samaritan in our modern age."

As an election strategy, chatting up religious folk is not a bad 
idea, on the surface. In the 2001 census, 83 percent of Canadians 
said they were religious, and 77 percent of all Canadians said they 
were Christians. Even in B.C., Canada's least religious province, 55 
percent of residents said they were Christian. But being Christian 
does not mean you're automatically against harm reduction. Kinghaven 
Treatment Centre in Abbotsford, for example, is run by a board of 
directors, many of whom are Mennonite. The centre is 
methadone-friendly and is open to forms of recovery other than 
abstinence, according to clinical manager Larry Saidman.

David Diewert, a local Old Testament scholar who grew up in a 
conservative church like Harper's, told the Straight that evangelical 
Christians use punishment to assert control, and the faith attracts a 
kind of black-and-white thinking that breeds self-righteousness. 
That's reflected in the new antidrug strategy's crime-and-punishment 
worldview, he said.

Diewert, however, isn't conservative anymore. He quit his full-time 
teaching job at Regent College, a theological school affiliated with 
UBC, and now lives as a "committed follower of Jesus", working in the 
Downtown Eastside. To him, harm reduction is Jesus-friendly. If 
Canada's politicians are going to make decisions based on ideology 
rather than science, he said, he wishes they would base them on a 
more complex faith.

"Jesus was constantly breaking the [social] codes that prolonged 
human suffering," Diewert, wearing his trademark grungy blue baseball 
cap, told the Straight in an interview at a Burrard Street coffee 
shop December 13. "It's not within my faith to put people within 
harm's way, to make systems that create harm."

Diewert suggested that people use illegal drugs to ease their 
suffering, the same reason people take legal drugs, such as morphine 
or insulin. Harm reduction, he said, is compassionate in a society 
that criminalizes those substances, but it does not ease the 
underlying causes of drug abuse: isolation, meaninglessness, abuse. 
In his work with the left-leaning pan-Christian group Streams of 
Justice and the more secular Creative Resistance (which he started 
with Catholic poet Bud Osborne), he hopes to address the root causes 
of suffering-as, he said, Jesus did.

"Harper has to recognize that if people stop taking drugs, they have 
to deal with the tsunami of pain underlying their addictions," he 
said. "Who's going to help them with that? If there were lots of 
options for people to belong, get affirmation, feel valued, there 
might be a reason for being abstinent."

Those same causes of addiction are outlined in Bruce Alexander's very 
secular 2001 document The Roots of Addiction in Free Market Society, 
written for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. "The barren 
pleasures of a street 'junkie'," reads Alexander's report, "are more 
sustaining than the unrelenting aimlessness of dislocation." And 
Vancouver, he argues, experiences great addiction because the city is 
terminally full of dislocated people. Avoiding addiction, whether 
articulated by Christians or secularists, comes down to a sense of 
connectedness.

Even Kendall recognizes that addiction has a root cause, though for 
him it's more tangible. Ninety-nine percent of Canadians are not 
addicted to heroin or cocaine, he said. "If we can get to that one 
percent early enough, we can even eliminate that." He suggested the 
feds should spend money on a national child-care strategy rather than 
an abstinence-based anti-drug "education" campaign of the type, he 
said, that studies show does not work. 
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MAP posted-by: Richard Lake