DRUG ADDICTS LOOK TINY THROUGH POLITICAL PRISM

What's forgotten in the heated rhetoric and speculation about whether
the federal Conservatives will renew Vancouver's safe injection site
is that it's not the solution to all of the city's drug problems. But
nor was it intended to be.

The $2-million-a-year, supervised facility where users inject illegal
drugs is only one piece of the so-called four pillars plan.

Taken together, the total plan of harm reduction, treatment,
enforcement and education was supposed to solve Vancouver's drug
addiction problems and possibly provide a model for other cities.

Yet, for the past three years that plan has teetered precariously,
possibly fatally, on harm reduction and enforcement alone. Treatment
and education have never received the kind of funding they need, even
though Vancouver's drug policy co-ordinator Donald MacPherson said
from the start that it can only work if simultaneous action is taken
on all four fronts.

InSite's aim was to reduce public injection drug use and unsafe
disposal of syringes, reduce overdoses and the spread of infectious
diseases, improve drug users' access to health care and, over the
longer term, get addicts into treatment.

Researchers have found that it has pretty much done that. There has
been a significant reduction in the number of intravenous drug users
injecting in public, less sharing of needles and a reduction in
discarded syringes and other injection-related paraphernalia.

Researchers at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS have
concluded that InSite has reduced the number of overdose deaths, as
well as the need for victims requiring hospitalization and paramedic
assistance.

What there has not been is a decrease in the number of
addicts.

"There were disappointingly few referrals to detoxification services
largely because clients usually did not meet the strict conditions
required to access those services," according to a recent RCMP-funded
study.

Vancouverites overwhelmingly supported the Four Pillars plan, but the
safe injection site has always been controversial. In 2002, for
example, a city-commissioned survey found that one in five residents
opposed even considering it as an option. Since InSite opened in 2003,
there has been no official measurement of public support.

For a short period of time, when enforcement was at its peak, the open
drug market around the Carnegie Centre largely disappeared. But it's
now re-opened and enforcement sent addicts out into other parts of the
city.

Streets and alleys in the Downtown Eastside may no longer be used as
shooting galleries, but aggressive beggars desperate for a fix are
frightening away tourists and conventioneers.

Addicts may have a safe place to inject their drugs, but Vancouver
still has the third-highest property crime rate in Canada, behind
Abbotsford and Regina.

And keen as Vancouverites say they are on having the drug problems
disappear, few want any part of the solution in their neighbourhoods.
In 2004, more than 3,000 people wrote to city council or signed
petitions opposing a $5.5-million, 39-unit transition home for
mentally ill, recovering addicts. Frightened residents didn't want it
near their schools, parks and homes.

Council went ahead anyway, describing the facility as "an essential
component of the four pillars strategy."

Six more treatment facilities are planned. City officials have yet to
say where they may be built, but a group called Not in Anyone's
Backyard has already formed to protest construction in virtually every
residential neighbourhood from the city's west side to its eastern
boundary. Its website has citations for studies indicating that
one-third of heroin users relapse within three days of leaving
treatment, and nearly two-thirds relapse into heroin use within 30
days.

When Larry Campbell, running for mayor in 2002, was asked if the safe
injection site was worth the $2-million-a-year cost, he shot back:
"What is the cost of a human life?"

Even at $2 million a year, InSite serves only a third of the 6,000
addicts in Vancouver. Even if the trial were tripled in size at a cost
of $6 million a year and all Vancouver's addicts had access to a safe
injection site, it still wouldn't make a dent in the problem without
funding for treatment and education.

And the price tag for all four pillars was estimated five years ago at
$30 million annually.

The price of a human life -- an addict's life -- is exactly what Prime
Minister Stephen Harper and his Health Minister Tony Clement are
calculating.

They will put it through their political prism, weighing the lives of
heroin and cocaine addicts (who aren't likely to vote for them in any
event) against those who might vote for them -- neighbours who are
afraid, seniors who need more and better housing, boomers' calls for
more money for knee and hip replacements, parents' pleas for expanded
child-care services and even Vancouver Olympic organizers' cries for
an extra $55 million.

Don't bet on them choosing addicts.