Pubdate: Fri, 15 Jun 2007 Source: Vancouver 24hours (CN BC) Copyright: 2007 Canoe Inc Contact: http://vancouver.24hrs.ca/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/3837 Author: Alex Tsakumis Note: Tsakumis is a freelance writer and a long-time political analyst. CITY MISSES THE POINT Shorty was a pleasant fellow. Bundled on the loading bay of my building off Pender, cigarette firmly in hand, and always ready to provide his commentary on the Downtown Eastside, he was a surprisingly lucid addict. He would appear at noon, every Thursday, wayward gait on full parade, with the mythic abandon of an overgrown imp. I'd hand him lunch through the bars of the back door, and we'd chat. It was the least I could do. He kept the back steps so clean after he shot up or "slept" there when knocked out from the heroin he paradoxically loathed, but loved. He never beckoned me for money and I never volunteered. His polite nature belied the ravages of severe drug addiction, Hepatitis C and HIV. His neck was pockmarked, particularly on his right side, where the countless needles had created a delicate blue hue of bruises above the pale backdrop of his weathered skin. Shorty would tell, eventually, that he had 'shot the tracks' in his feet, torso, legs and arms so many times that the only "good ones" left were in his neck. When I saw him wandering about downtown, he always refused to shake my hand. "You could catch somethin' Al, eh...?" and he'd laugh. Some friends wondered how I knew him. Yet others wondered why I would want to. To me, he was a friend: Raised in Saskatchewan, an only child, by a loving but very poor, single mother. He was an ardent TV/movie-buff. When on his way, he never said goodbye. It was always "fade to black, that way I know I'll see you again." His money from working the rigs and occasional movie trailers in Alberta brought him relative happiness, but, too, a brutal cocaine habit that eventually landed him on Vancouver's mean streets. Heroin, first as elixir, became his final frontier. He hadn't seen Cody, his daughter, since he abandoned her when she was three. His mother had committed suicide years before I met him. It bothered him greatly. "They were both better off without me Al ... all's I can remember is I was never no use to either of 'em. See these wool gloves, they were Mom's, got 'em from 'er when I said, 'so long'. I cut the tips off. You're the only friend I got outside this place Al." He continued, "You know, everybody down here is dead, eh? Most of 'em are sick in the head, they do the shit just to get by. Really dyin' .. it be kinda like a break." He abhorred the idea of a safe-injection site. "They can't do nothin' with none a these people ... you gotta get 'em off the stuff ... too many people makin' excuses ... the big politicians are askin' the wrong questions." His prophetic words never stopped in my mind when I thought of him, as much for their stunning as for their truth. I've been thinking about Shorty lately, very much - with reason. Mayor Sam Sullivan's drug "strategies" are hardly the "compassionate approaches" he fawns on about. I've spoken to dozens of addicts - all delightedly accepting therapy in treatment facilities. I visited clinics here and in the U.S. and recently met with addicts in recovery and addictionologists who warned Mr. Sullivan of the peril of his ways. No shock at all that the warnings fell on deaf ears. The notion of replacing cocaine with Ritalin or OxyContin, or any other kind of "legal" drug, is scientifically unsupportable if one considers that the studies cited are on a small percentage of addicts, who randomly happen to take to this strategy. In their results, the studies themselves are inconclusive at best. It's simply the groundwork for replacement addiction. Ritalin, for the unaware, is a drug that was used for years to treat chaotic behavior in children. Instead, it produced an unfathomable psychosis previously unobserved. OxyContin, is a heavy pain-relief drug, made famous by the addiction of American Conservative talk-show powerhouse Rush Limbaugh. Replacement therapy for stimulant abuse is tricky. It does not deal with mental illness, which is at the genesis of the vast majority of issues plaguing the DTES and it neither "replaces" anything, nor, most importantly, breaks the cycle of addiction. It just buys another kind of crazy. It's not like methadone, which trumps heroin and completes the drug-receptor cycle. On methadone, doing heroin is an exercise in futility. On any of the replacement drugs proposed by the mayor, you can still go about the city and get higher than a kite. No wonder the participation from the appropriately respected Dr. John Blatherwick was buttressed by a begrudging, "...well, I guess we'll give it a shot." Goodness, what a ringing endorsement. Sam Sullivan and his cadre of semi-retired hippies, pseudo-social engineers, and political opportunists have decided that instead of a workable roadmap to help the addicted-downtrodden (pushing for multi-disciplinary drug-treatment centres and the reopening of previously closed mental-health facilities), they will embark upon a sure-to-fail plan of replacement "therapy" that will somehow sanitize the DTES in time for the Olympics. Turn a clean Olympic dime, without the years of government neglect on full display in a soiled vetrina where we will throw good money after bad at a small portion of the drug addicted, in the faint hope that this all might work - that's what Mr. Sullivan is really saying. In full Olympic delirium, His Worship adds, "We will be eliminating the dealer..." Sure, Sam. After the dealer has gotten up off the floorboards of his Ferrari from laughing himself almost into a coma, I'm sure he'll just wither away, depressed. The War of Drugs never existed because of politicians precisely like Mr. Sullivan. Even if you legalized narcotics, the dealer would concoct better drugs with greater intensity and put the government out of business. Competition would thrive. This isn't, after all, Holland, where the same kind of strategies Mr. Sullivan foams about has proven to create a super-environment of drug tourism. If the Mayor and his hardliners get their way, Vancouver will become every drug-tourist's North American destination of choice. Some former and current politicians of all political stripes are on-board with the insanity, too. Of course, they are all to blame for the decades of utterly shameful tunnel vision that got us here in the first place. Silent Sam is even shamelessly putting up the idea of closing the 'Four Pillars' (when only one pillar is really working) as a bargaining chip with his Tory buddies in Vancouver and Ottawa. On the day I told Shorty my contract was up, he asked me for my gloves. I gave them up freely; he looked so damned cold. No sooner had I handed them over, but in gentle resignation, he took off those from his mother, stuffed them into his pocket and put on the "new" pair. And then, he reached out his right hand. "Fair, eh? I get the gloves an' ya get the handshake ya always wanted. My name is Ian. Take care of yourself and that new wife of yours Al. I'm gonna miss ya." And with that, we never saw each other again, perhaps knowing that while our lives were so very different, our blood was from the same Eden. Fade to black. Tsakumis is a freelance writer and a long-time political analyst. - --- MAP posted-by: Derek