IN SWAGGERVILLE, O'BRIEN SNUFFS CRACK PIPES WITH A SNEER

Mayor Larry O'Brien is fond of referring to the city's crack-pipe
kits as "loot bags" of drug goodies.

This is supposed to be funny, or at least clever, I take it. Crack is
about as funny as cancer. Being addicted to crack, in fact, is
possibly the unfunniest thing I've ever heard.

HIV and hepatitis C are not funny. Being addicted to crack and
contracting HIV or hep C is absolutely the unfunniest thing I've ever heard.

Not long ago, the mayor was talking on the radio about panhandlers.
Too many of them downtown, His Worship said. This is true. But
beggars are as old as street corners -- one of those problems many
have managed, but never solved.

Why not just stop handing them money, the mayor suggested? It worked
for pigeons. Stop feeding them -- they go away. Days later, he said
his pigeon-panhandling analogy was "probably regrettable." Probably
was. Not very funny, either.

This kind of phrasing from a politician is deliberate, and what it
does, over time, is set a tone. Any mayor sets the tone of his own
office. The council does not force it on him. And the public is
expert at reading tone, a kind of political body language.

Marion Dewar's term in office had a distinct vibe (worldly,
big-hearted). So did Jim Durrell's (old-boy sporty) and Jim Watson's
(accessible Boy Scoutish). So did Bob Chiarelli's (competent plodding).

Mayor O'Brien's tone is emerging. Think of Swaggerville and alpha-
male and loot bags and pigeons. Think of a millionaire in a fancy
glass condo above Belinda Stronach and a chauffeured Mercedes.

And what you detect, toward the poor and the homeless and the
marginal -- and he is mayor of the hobos and hookers and the junkies,
by the way -- is a sneer. If he intended something else, it has gone awry.

He campaigned on dumping the program and has done so. Fine. Maybe it
was a stupid use of municipal money. Maybe crack kits are the job of
the Ministry of Health. But why the glib mockery?

The amount of attention paid to the city's crack-pipe program was
ridiculously out of proportion to its cost, which was roughly $7,500
a year. At City Hall, this isn't even paper-clip money. And hasn't it
become the poster child for profligate spending and wacky priorities?

No money for transit? Yeah, but we hand out free crack pipes. Can't
cut the grass in parks and medians? Yeah, but we hand out free crack
pipes. Must cut back on recycling? Yeah, but we hand out free crack
pipes. Ad nauseam.

It does have a counter-intuitive feel to it. Why spend public money,
especially municipal funds, to help crack addicts smoke crack?

Well, maybe in the addiction-fighting world, where they prescribe
methadone to heroin addicts, we should not be guided by the opinions
of politically-motivated amateurs. Everyone in the addiction field
thought the program was a good idea. The city's own medical officer
of health -- this is how he makes his living -- thought it was a
sound idea. A harm reduction program that saves just one case of HIV
or hep C saves the medical system a fortune.

But supporting a crack-pipe program requires a minor amount of
sophisticated reasoning.

The politicians knew better. The vote breakdown, 15 to 7, was
interesting. Every downtown councillor, save the absent Georges
Bedard, voted to retain the program. Most of the suburbs and
countryside voted against.

No one from the suburbs ever gets involved in crack. No, that would
never happen, not in a million years. All those bad people come from
somewhere else. Merivale Road can go back to peacefully aisle-grazing
at Winners.

The mayor's alternative to the program was inventive, but not
particularly helpful. He wants to lobby for a 48-bed treatment centre
in the city, presumably to be paid for by another level of
government. What may be decoded in his message -- and it comes back
to tone -- is this: get the crack-heads off the street and out of my face.

What of those addicts who refuse treatment, or fail at it? And why
in- house treatment, as opposed to out-patient? Why 48 beds and not
148? Why not contract out to existing, private facilities, instead?
How is he an addictions expert, all of a sudden?

A city that yanks $7,500 in annual funds to fight the effects of drug
addiction is hardly on the high ground in urging another
public-sector arm to spend millions -- onetime and on-going -- on a
treatment centre.

Loot bag? No. A different bag of tricks altogether.