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.