IN SEARCH OF A FIX FOR URBAN DRUG MISERY

VANCOUVER -- Philip Owen, Vancouver's mayor, puts the matter squarely.
Despite endless discussion, earnest work and government programs, "little
progress has been made to reduce the negative impact of substance misuse on
our neighbourhoods and our citizens."

Vancouver is not alone with an urban drug problem, but this city's is
especially acute, in part because it is a major entry point for drugs from
Asia and because users and pushers are so concentrated in one area, the
Downtown Eastside. Since 1993, Vancouver has averaged 147
illicit-drug-overdose deaths a year.

Mr. Owen has been energetically trying to draw attention to the need for a
municipal/provincial/federal attack on the drug problem. He's right to do
so, because no one level of government alone can alleviate the problem in
neighbourhoods such as the Downtown Eastside.

Last spring, after extensive public consultation, the city's drug policy
co-ordination unit issued a four-part Framework for Action strategy. It
makes sensible recommendations for prevention, treatment, enforcement and
harm reduction, based on the principles that "addiction needs treatment and
criminal behaviour needs enforcement."

These principles are easier said than implemented.

A city such as Vancouver can only do so much for a complex problem with
international and national links. Ottawa is responsible for immigration and
refugees, border control and the criminal law, and in none of these areas
is it being as helpful as it should.

Canada's refugee-determination processes are slow and deportation efforts
notoriously inefficient. Plenty of pushers, runners and drug kingpins are
in the Vietnamese, Chinese and Honduran communities and, although it is
categorically wrong to stigmatize these communities as drug havens, neither
the immigration nor refugee-determination procedures help weed out bad apples.

Worse still have been the effects of court rulings under the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms (especially the security-of-the-person section), and
the federal Justice Department's fear of swelling the jail population.

Mr. Owen eagerly hands a visitor a pile of newspaper articles reporting
judicial rulings so light against pushers and dealers as to defy belief.
(Charges against Dial-a-Dope pushers were thrown out under the Charter
because police broke down the door of their apartment instead of checking
to see whether it was unlocked.) Apparently not much has changed in the
lower courts since RCMP undercover officers with whom I travelled four
years ago almost threw up their hands in despair at remanded court dates,
light sentences and disappeared accused.

Ottawa, in fairness, participated in the Vancouver Agreement of March,
2000, and funded some early projects in the Downtown Eastside. But much
more is needed, especially for treatment and harm prevention. It's too
early to tell whether the B.C. government will step up its efforts,
although Premier Gordon Campbell knows all about the problems, since he
served as Vancouver's mayor for seven years.

Toronto has been experimenting since 1998 with a special drug treatment
court in which users who plead guilty are placed in treatment programs.
Vancouver might copy this model.

Needle-exchange programs need expansion, since dirty needles are a prime
means of transmitting HIV and hepatitis C. Switzerland, the Netherlands,
Germany and Britain are trying various heroin-assisted therapy programs for
addicts. Methadone as a replacement for heroin has been tried with some
success in B.C. and elsewhere and might be expanded.

Many anti-drug campaigners insist that programs of abstinence for
recovering users is the best strategy, but the Vancouver report suggests it
may not always be the best approach. So-called low-threshold support
programs, whereby small doses of drugs are consumed in safe, supervised
injection rooms, may help people wean themselves better than straight
abstinence.

The Vancouver report stays far away from the contentious issue of
legalizing drugs, as advocated by New Mexico's governor and such
publications as The Economist. A case can be made for legalization, but the
public antipathy to the idea is such that no Canadian politician will touch it.

Plenty of fine people and worthy community organizations have been
struggling to improve things in the Downtown Eastside, arguably the most
concentrated pocket of drug-related misery in Canada. Their efforts border
on the heroic.

They often work against formidable odds: the power of drug syndicates,
lenient courts, the Charter, the tragedy of mental illness, desperate
poverty, deep addictions, lack of proper shelter for those in distress,
insufficient funds. Mr. Owen has made further progress a bit of a personal
crusade, and both senior levels of government have provided additional funds.

But more money is needed, plus tougher enforcement against pushers and a
wider range of treatment options for users, if more progress is to be made.