OFFICIALS DEBATE BEST USE OF DRUG FUNDING

General Consensus Says That Addicts in Downtown Eastside Should Be the Priority

Local politicians and health officials are waiting anxiously to find
out exactly what they're going to get out of the federal government's
new National Anti-Drug Strategy money.

Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan claimed this week that Health Minister
Tony Clement promised him directly, in an Ottawa meeting, that
Vancouver will get "up to $10 million" of the $64-million fund
announced in November.

And Sullivan says he is pushing to see that money go to the
drug-substitution trials he has been advocating for two years, which
would see an array of legal substitutes for heroin and cocaine given
to drug users who haven't been successful at quitting.

He says a program like that would help one group in particular:
sex-trade workers. But it's unclear at this point what the real
amount will be, where it will go and who will actually get the cheque.

Staff at Clement's office and Colin Metcalfe, who runs the B.C.
regional ministers' office for the federal government, did not return
repeated calls from The Vancouver Sun to confirm or clarify where the
drug strategy money is headed. In the original announcement, the
government said $32 million would go to treatment across the country,
$22 million to law enforcement, and $10 million to prevention.

Both Sullivan and Vancouver's drug policy coordinator, Don
MacPherson, said the federal government hasn't said yet who will
actually get the money directly. That will, in part, depend on what
it's going to be used for.

As well, other municipalities, like Surrey and Victoria, are also
lobbying for some of that money to deal with the serious drug
problems they have.

B.C.'s chief medical health officer, Perry Kendall, and MacPherson
said Health Canada met with a number of officials in B.C. last month
to hear their thoughts on what the money should be used for.

Both said there was general agreement that people want to see the
money used for one group in particular -- the mentally ill drug
addicts in the province, many of them in the Downtown Eastside and
most of them homeless.

"It's one of the areas where there's a consensus that B.C. has very
little capacity at the academic level or at the clinical level to
deal with that very large population," MacPherson said.

Kendall said he would like to see whatever money the federal money is
going to give for treatment go to a program that would build up the
skills and capacity of mental-health and addictions workers dealing
with that group. That would mean creating a new kind of
health-sciences centre that would focus on this new group of patients
who often end up falling in the cracks between what have
traditionally been two distinct services, mental health and addictions.

MacPherson said that kind of academic centre would have clinical
trials with substitute drugs -- the kinds of trials Sullivan has been
advocating for.

The trick for the federal government will be in identifying where to
put that money in a way that's visible and won't be swallowed up by
existing programs.

Vancouver Coastal Health spent $77 million on mental-health services
and $34 million on addiction services in its last fiscal year, while
Victoria spent $37 million on mental health and $6.5 million on
addictions. Since the federal government's $10 million will be spread
out over five years, the $2 million a year won't make a significant
change in what those big health regions deliver.

What would make more of a difference, Kendall and MacPherson say, is
if the money were used to start an entirely new kind of initiative.