FEDERAL GOVERNMENT'S ANTI-DRUG STRATEGY IS A TRAGIC DECEPTION

Blue-Ribbon Panel Column

My family used to swim at the quarry near Collins Bay. It was a great
place to swim. The water was clean, cool and deep.

Across the quarry was a cliff. It dropped about 20 feet to a rock
ledge that protruded out about 10 feet to the water's edge. If you ran
and leaped off the cliff at full speed, you could clear the rock ledge
below and land in the water.

The only ones who ever tried it were adolescent boys - and there was
always a lineup of those willing to try. One day a lad slipped at the
cliff edge and fell to his death. The quarry was fenced off.

Those boys didn't choose to engage in this mindlessly dangerous
activity because they couldn't see the danger. They did it because it
was dangerous. The risk made it worth doing.

Adolescents - and particularly adolescent boys - are drawn to risk,
not repelled by it. It is now well-established that the part of the
brain that makes people avoid dangerous situations is not fully
developed in males until they reach their mid-20s. They don't learn
well from the experiences of others or believe that something bad
could happen to them.

Risk-seeking explains why some kids ride motorcycles and drive too
fast, and go into rough and dangerous places, and ski like maniacs. It
is also why some "experiment" with drugs.

Whether drug use is reckless, irresponsible, self-destructive or just
mindlessly stupid, the fact remains that it happens, and sometimes it
engulfs young people in a destructive process over which they have
little control.

It takes a lot of time and support to tame an addiction. Many
injection drug users will not live long enough to address the problem
of their addiction. They will contract hepatitis C or HIV or die from
an overdose or be killed by other contaminants in their unregulated
drugs or, sometimes, be murdered by their johns on a "bad date."

I can't get out of my mind the scene in the documentary Fix of a young
woman lying in an alley and being injected with filthy heroin through
disease-contaminated needles. The friend who was injecting her was so
damaged by her own drug use that she was involuntarily spasming and
jerking.

Desperation for a fix is aggravated by the intolerable conditions of
addicts' lives. Sobering up brings them face-to-face with the disaster
of their lives and the physical pain of withdrawal. Anyone who has
tried to quit smoking or has dieted knows that the resolve to take
control most often breaks down on a bad day. For addicts, every day is
a very bad day. Driven to meet the need that addiction creates often
drives a person from family and friends and into prostitution and
crime. Strung-out addicts don't make particularly good thieves, so
drug dealing becomes an obvious choice for a person with no other
options to make hundreds of dollars each day.

Surely it is the quest of a fool to try to dream up punishments that
would be sufficiently painful to deter addicts from using or dealing
drugs. What torture would be sufficient?

The federal government's so-called "drug strategy" is to get tough
with dealers by forcing judges to hand out long mandatory prison
sentences. Meanwhile, they will offer "prevention and treatment"
services to ordinary users. The strategy suggests an astonishing
ignorance of the relationship between using and dealing. Implying that
long prison terms will deter drug dealing by addicts is a tragic deception.

The options for a drug addict boil down to two very different
approaches. The first is to get the addict off drugs so that he or she
can get his or her life back and thereby avoid crime, disease and death.

In Canada, we rely almost entirely on this first option. Based on
federal spending allocations, this approach consists of 95 per cent
enforcement, with punishments being the outcome, and five per cent
treatment and prevention. The problem is that treatment for those in
the throes of drug addiction is notoriously ineffective, and never
works for those who are dead. Also, enforcement has been largely
unsuccessful, as evidenced by drug prices that remain low while drugs
remain available everywhere.

The second option is one in which addicts are helped to stay alive,
live outside of criminal activity, rebuild relationships with family
and sober friends, and build some support so they have a better chance
of benefiting from treatment. It is part of a broader range of
strategies referred to as "harm reduction".

Avoiding death is the rationale behind InSite, located on Vancouver's
drug-ridden Downtown Eastside and the only safe-injection site in
Canada. A starting point for harm reduction is to provide an
environment in which those who inject drugs can find clean needles and
have emergency medical staff available should they overdose. This is
really a pretty modest and obvious step if avoiding death is the objective.

But even this modest attempt to address reality in a highly controlled
experimental environment like InSite is apparently beyond our federal
government's comprehension. InSite has been a continuing target of
Stephen Harper's government since it came to power. Never mind that
more than two dozen peer-reviewed expert studies have shown
consistently that the InSite project saves lives, reduces needle
sharing and increases treatment-seeking but does not promote crime in
the area.

The British Columbia government, Vancouver city hall, the Vancouver
police, the Canadian Medical Association and most others who are aware
of the research have - sometimes reluctantly - become supporters of
InSite. The B. C. Supreme Court recently intervened to stop the
federal government from closing the project. But the government
apparently doesn't believe the studies. It knows better. How is it
that Harper and his caucus cannot understand the concept of "harm
reduction" but have no difficulty understanding the concept of "damage
control?" Aren't they really the same thing? In both cases, you try to
minimize the damage that arises from your mistakes so that the
ramifications don't destroy you. It is not as though the government
has no experience to draw upon.

Would any moral person deny the overwhelming evidence and let people
die just to gain political points with those who don't know any
better? So which is it? Are Harper and his caucus stupid, blind or
heartless?

Graham Stewart retired last year after working for 38 years for the
John Howard Society, a charitable organization that helps people who
come into conflict with the law.