EACH PROVINCE A LABORATORY

Federal Health Minister Tony Clement doesn't have to help pay for
Vancouver's safe drug-injection site, but he should at least promise
not to shut the place down without clear evidence that it's doing
more harm than good.

A group of scientists who've been studying the site since it opened
in 2003 are worried about its future. Health Canada gave the site a
special operating licence, which is up for renewal at the end of
2007. Mr. Clement, however, describes the results as mixed -- and
here the scientists disagree.

Their research shows the injection site has reduced drug use on the
streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, reduced the spread of HIV
and AIDS among drug users there, and helped get addicts into
treatment. In contrast, multiple studies have shown that a more
traditional anti-drug initiative such as the school-based Drug
Awareness Resistance Education program has zero effect on drug use
among students, and yet the federal government spends up to $5 million on it.

"[W]hile controversial interventions" -- such as the injection site
- -- "are being held to an extraordinary standard of proof,
interventions receiving the greatest proportion of funding remain
under-evaluated," complain Kora DeBeck, Evan Wood, Julio Montaner and
Thomas Kerr.

The four are clearly supporters of the harm-reduction philosophy
represented by the injection site. But their biases aside, they still
have a scientifically valid point.

Research on the injection site has been hindered by Mr. Clement's
withdrawal of $1.5 million in federal funding for more studies of the
site's effectiveness.

The federal health ministry doesn't have to pay for anything the
government doesn't want to pay for, of course. But at minimum it
should stay out of the way of British Columbia's willingness to experiment.

In health matters perhaps more than any others, each province should
be free to make its own way. That way, we can have 10 laboratories
for health policy and funding, each learning the best practices of
the others. Mr. Clement has acknowledged as much, saying the
provinces should decide on their own ways of shortening wait times
for much-demanded medical procedures. If that means more public
money, or if it means more private care, that's up to them.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper's famous "firewall letter" advocating
that Alberta extricate itself as much as possible from federal
interference in provincial jurisdictions relied on the same argument.
In the firewall letter, Mr. Harper and his co-writers seemed worried,
not unreasonably, about a federal government jealous of Alberta's
prosperity and ideologically inclined to suppress free-market
innovations in public policy. Now it's Mr. Harper's government that
B.C. is worried about, one that seems ideologically inclined to
suppress innovation in drug-treatment policy because it doesn't match
the federal Tories' tough-on-crime prejudices.

Ideology has its place, but not as a substitute for science. If Mr.
Clement has doubts about whether the safe injection site works, he
should fund research aimed at answering his questions rather than
casting aspersions he can't support. Otherwise, he should leave it to
the B.C. government, the regional health authority and the City of
Vancouver to decide on an appropriate local response to a local problem.