DRUG RULING NEEDS TO BE APPEALED

In its ruling on the federal government's drug law Tuesday, the B.C.
Supreme Court contrived a devious justification for the continued
operation of Vancouver's safe injection site -- where junkies shoot
up illegal drugs under medical supervision, in a building for which
the federal government had granted a succession of temporary
exemptions from the law, as a test of concept.

First, Justice Ian Pitfield defined the program as health care.

That in turn created a jurisdictional dilemma. Criminal law -- in
this case, the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act -- is Ottawa's
business, but health is provincial. Who then should make the rules
for Insite, as the facility jointly funded by Vancouver Coastal
Health and Health Canada, is officially known?

The province, declared Pitfield.

Then, he also ruled a section of the Act unconstitutional, reasoning
that denial of health care threatened the Charter guarantee of
"security of the person."

We recognize courts must acknowledge the Charter, and that what might
seem obvious to the man on the street, may be revealed as
considerably nuanced in the hands of legal counsel.

Nevertheless, this is a classic case of not seeing the wood for the
trees. These people are in trouble, and society's goal must be to get
them out of it, not keep them there.

Let's be frank. Nobody goes on heroin ignorant of its addictive
qualities, or that it opens the trapdoor to life's cellar -- a dark
world in which premature aging is the least of drug abuse's
penalties, and awaits after abscesses, collapsed veins, vulnerability
to bacterial infections, infection of the heart lining and valves,
arthritis and other rheumatological problems have all taken their toll.

Junkies are vulnerable, sickly people. Justice is not to be found in
abstractions about whether all kinds of drug use are considered
equally, nor virtue in facilitating their continued drug abuse at the
taxpayers' expense.

Rather, as government is instituted by people as both servant and
protector, the issue is clear: Ottawa is constitutionally authorized
to protect Canadians by making sensible decisions about dangerous
drugs, of which heroin and crack are among the worst. For a court to
reconstitute protected illegal drug use as security of the person, is
simply perverse.

Ottawa must appeal Pitfield's decision. It cannot be allowed to stand.