KEEP THE DEALERS OUT

Ottawa's homeless shelters have the beginning of an answer to the
million-dollar question of what to do with homeless drug dealers
who've been charged by police. Stop bringing them to us, they say.

The heads of the Mission, the Shepherds of Good Hope and the Salvation
Army have written a letter to police, meant to be read by judges who
deal with the street-level addicts who deal on the side to support
their own habits. The shelters beg the authorities not to leave
homeless people facing such charges on the shelters' doorsteps. More
than that, they want judges to stop ordering such people to live at
the shelters, as sometimes happens when the judges hope doing so will
bring some stability to the alleged dealers' lives.

This isn't hard-heartedness on the part of the people who do some of
the dirtiest charity work in the city. It's a properly hard-headed
response to the serious threat dealers pose to other homeless people.

Shelters, once meant to catch the desperately homeless before they
froze to death on cold nights, have become catch-alls, expected not
only to house people who need a roof in an emergency, but to help
treat the problems that put them on the street, too. They've responded
heroically, matching the most desperate among us with services and
people who will strive mightily to help them.

But some problems are beyond them. Alcoholics and most people with
mental illnesses usually pose their greatest dangers to themselves;
dealers are most dangerous to others. Shelters are good at keeping
people warm. While they may also provide services, they aren't
drug-treatment centres, they aren't mental wards, and they aren't
particularly good at supervising people who need to be watched every
minute. It's not what they're for.

So expecting -- actually, requiring -- shelters to take in people who
the police accuse of actively preying on others is not only unfair to
the shelters, but an added danger to the people the shelters are
supposed to serve. It's true that accused drug dealers are legally
innocent until proven guilty, but that's not the standard the shelters
should need to apply. Ordinarily, shelter staff can use their own
discretion to kick people out for making trouble. It's senseless to
take that prerogative away from them precisely because someone's
gotten so disruptive the police have laid charges.

What's to be done instead? That's the hard thing. Ottawa has almost no
residential drug-treatment programs to speak of, which might help
those who deal drugs because they need the money for their own
addictions; we have little place for the dangerously mentally ill; the
detention centre on Innes Road is no place for someone who needs help
with either problem.

Providing the supports to help people who truly cannot help themselves
is an expensive prospect, but it's the right thing to do, and cheaper
than treating only the symptoms. It's certainly better than dumping
predatory drug dealers right back on their victims.