SULLIVAN TAKES NEW ANTI-DRUG STRATEGY

VANCOUVER - Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan is taking a new direction in
his war on drugs.

The mayor has written to Health Minister Tony Clement to say he would
like some of the federal government's anti-drug strategy money to go
to street health-care teams, not just the drug-substitution
experiments that he has been advocating for the last two years.

In a letter sent off March 6, Sullivan specifically asks that some of
the $10 million he says has been promised to Vancouver be used for
what are called "assertive community teams."

Those teams are a tool being used in various parts of the United
States, Ontario and, recently, Victoria, as a way to try to cope with
the rising numbers of mentally ill people who are heavy drug users and
often living on the streets.

ACT teams, as they're called, focus on going out to where these
people are, since they are often the kind of people who will not use
regular clinic-based services that require showing up for
appointments. As well, many standard addiction or health services have
a hard time coping with such patients' multiple problems.

As a result, even when there are a lot of health services available,
they typically end up not being helped by anyone except police and
hospital emergency rooms.

Sullivan also said the city, under Project Civil City, has been
focusing more effort in recent months on the "dual diagnosed," as the
mentally ill and drug-addicted are sometimes labelled.

That also convinced him the teams "do have many benefits."

Besides funding the teams, his letter suggests that the money also be
used for a prevention project with the Vancouver school board and to
help develop a new Centre for Severe Addictions and Concurrent Research.

That centre, which has been proposed by University of B.C. addictions
researcher Dr. Michael Krausz, would be the group that ultimately
carries out the experiments that Sullivan has supported.

But, Sullivan acknowledges, the centre is a more institutional and
standard way of carrying out drug research than what he originally
launched two years ago.

He started out in 2006 raising money personally for the substitution
trials. Then he helped start a non-profit called Inner Change, whose
staff worked on the goal of getting trials designed and funded. Long
after that, city council got around to adopting a policy that
drug-substitution trials were an option that should be supported in
its Four Pillars approach to drug addiction.

But Sullivan's approach confused many, who couldn't understand how a
non-profit or a mayor working separately from his council could
institute experimental drug research.

Sullivan said doing experiments through a centre is a better way to go
pragmatically.

"I have to be realistic about the political environment."

The federal government announced last year that it would spend $64
million on a new national drug strategy. Although few details have
been released so far about who will get money for what, Sullivan says
he has been told Vancouver will get $10 million.