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.