TWO PILLARS ARE MISSING IN HELPING OUR HOPELESS

As the Sept. 12 deadline to extend the life of Vancouver's supervised
injection site nears, certain tough truths are emerging.

The injection site has been widely acclaimed as worthwhile, as I
noted in a column earlier this week. It should be continued.

Yet, promised strategies that should supplement the site to enable it
to function in a genuinely productive way, have never been properly
implemented.

Remember all that jazz about the four-pillars approach?

That referred to harm reduction, as reflected by the supervised
injection site on East Hastings. It also referred to more police
enforcement, which has been apparent.

A third element was treatment, the fourth was prevention. B.C.
appears to be failing on both these latter fronts, making it unlikely
that the ideological Harper government will endorse the injection
site as long as it's part of an incomplete system of pillars.

I drive by Main and Hastings on one of my regular routes. Every time
I pass, I'm taken aback by the hordes of people wandering the area
who can only be described as societal outcasts, lost souls.

Statistics from a May Senate report that disappeared from public view
far too quickly, titled Out of the Shadows at Last, reveal that one
in three homeless Canadians have mental health problems.

One in three who suffer from mental illness will experience a
substance-abuse problem during their lives. More than half of all
drug abusers suffer from mental illness.

Given such numbers, how meaningful can a single supervised injection
site really be?

The Senate report's lead spokesman, retired Liberal Senator Michael
Kirby, has stated an obvious truth: Canada has deinstitutionalized
its mental hospitals and simply let those discharged wander onto the
streets or make their way into prisons.

A separate report, released this week by the left-leaning Centre for
Policy Alternatives, gives more pause for thought. It puts blame for
B.C.'s current Main and Hastings situation on the provincial government.

Community-Based Mental Health Services in B.C. declares flatly: "The
provincial government has ignored its responsibility to develop a
comprehensive mental-health strategy for the province that
establishes the provision of income, employment and housing supports
to people with mental illness."

The 32-page document, authored by Simon Fraser University's Marina
Morrow, a health sciences assistant professor and community
psychologist, says B.C. needs to act on a 2005 Homeless Action Plan
to create 3,200 new housing units -- among which would be 750 units
for people with mental illness and 750 units for those with drug addictions.

How are we truly helping someone who doesn't even have a roof over
his head simply by giving him a clean place to go and shoot up? Where
are all the treatment beds for detox and rehab? What are these users,
so many of whom are mentally ill, supposed to do when they leave the
shooting gallery?

Morrow's report only goes back to 2001 in reviewing the B.C.
government's record.

It's not a good one. One of the province's first actions was to cut
the position of mental health advocate and a protected spending
envelope for mental health services.

Further, mental health staffing within the provincial government was
cut by 70 per cent, "thus radically altering policy and leadership capacity."

Morrow's report notes, "housing, especially in Vancouver, is often
provided in unsafe locations and outside of a therapeutic environment."

And, "community-based mental health services continue to be
under-funded, and active recovery models are undervalued in the
overall system of mental health care."

Canadians, and British Columbians, need to face up to the fact that
we're offering Band-Aids to the mentally ill in our midst.

A supervised injection site is useful to reduce transmission of HIV
and Hep C and prevent overdose deaths. But let's acknowledge it's a
spit in the bucket in terms of comprehensively addressing real and
widespread mental health and addiction needs so apparently visible on
our streets.

It's all well and good to shell out additional tens of millions for
building 2010 Olympics venues -- as Ottawa and B.C. did Wednesday --
but a better balance must be found when it comes to taking care of
our helpless and hopeless.