AT-RISK TEENS PLUS HARD-CORE ADDICTS EQUAL DISASTER

The province's little-noticed $10-million-plus plan to house up to
100 hard-core drug addicts cheek-by-jowl with at-risk youth and BCIT
at Willingdon and Canada Way looks like a recipe for disaster.

How can we expect anyone to kick a drug habit next to a campus,
playground and facility peopled with two-dozen or so teens with drug
habits, prostitution issues, mental health problems and their own
social nightmares?

This is the work of the Solicitor's-General department and was done
with no consultation with the public or those in the health system
who work with the seriously troubled kids at the Maples Adolescent
Treatment Centre in Burnaby.

With only two months to go before the new facility opens, Vancouver
Coastal Health still can't say how many of these worst-case addicts
will be from the new community court and how many will come from
other referral services. They still don't have an operational and
clinical plan for the facility.

I'm also reliably informed that the adolescent care workers at the
Maples were stunned at the announcement and horrified at the prospects.

Although these adults who have hit bottom could have been adequately
housed in facilities renovated on the Riverview lands, such a site
conflicted with Victoria's plans to profit there from mixed
residential and commercial development.

The City of Burnaby now is trying to find out what the heck Victoria
is actually up to and for how long it hopes to operate this facility.
At one point it had asked the Liberal administration to consider
using the area for some kind of homeless shelter.

The 16-hectare site owned by the province across the street from the
B.C. Institute of Technology would be worth a small fortune if its
institutional zoning were changed.

From 1959 to 1973, the Willingdon School for Girls -- a euphemism
for a detention centre -- was located there. Until three years ago,
there was also a separate psychiatric ward building, but patients
were transferred to Burnaby Hospital.

Those buildings are empty and the Maples treatment centre remains.

About two months ago, Victoria said it would spend $10 million to
retrofit one of the buildings on the site. Operating costs will add
another $3 million or so to the bill.

The renovated facility will have a lifespan of about five years.
After that, the province won't say what it plans or whether a
permanent facility might be built.

During that time, the province plans to house on the site for
stretches ranging from three to 18 months severely mentally ill
addicts -- the so-called dual-diagnosed. The stay is intended to be
their initiation into long-term treatment.

Heather Hay, of Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, told me Friday
she couldn't say how many of these patients will come from the
community court that opens this summer. Let me hazard a guess -- all of them.

I say that because the number of patients being talked about for this
facility is exactly the same number of people the government hopes to
process through the community court, which will offer long-term,
addicted offenders the option of treatment or jail.

Hay and Victoria, I suspect, don't want to say that because nothing
will get Burnaby residents up in arms faster than news that up to 100
drug-addled chronic criminals from the Downtown Eastside are being
moved into their municipality to live.

Regardless of those NIMBY concerns, this plan is fraught with risk
and lack of vision.

Both the adolescent and addict populations we are talking about are
fragile and vulnerable. But both also have incredible exploitative
and predatory tendencies that proximity may exacerbate or polish.

Coastal Health has been told to figure out how to make this work on
the basis that this is a good-news announcement and that the province
is taking at least a baby step toward providing services for those
most in need.

I think they've been set up for failure. And the sad part is, two
worthwhile programs may go down the tubes because of this hastily
made, shortsighted decision.