MCTREATMENT WON'T MEET NEEDS OF ADDICTS

Compassionate citizens of Vancouver with a genuine desire to help
addicts have become victims of an elaborate hoax at the hands of
bureaucrats and quacks. The hoax involves the promise of treatment at
new facilities such as the Fraser Street addict apartment complex and
another under consideration for Dunbar.

With the majority of citizens agreeing that addiction is a mental,
therefore a medical problem, the promise of so called "treatment
centres" has a plausible ring. The problem is that the regimen being
proposed at these centres has nothing to do with treatment.

A quick check with medical associations such as those for doctors and
dentists provides easy definition of medical treatment. The definition
involves highly trained practitioners functioning under tight
regulations administering a scientifically-validated procedure backed
by hard, statistical success rates. Compare this to what may go on at
the addict apartment complexes. The training involved for staff is
actually less than that required for a supervisor at McDonald's. It
amounts to 10 days of workshops. And unlike the fast food supervisor,
these 10-day medical wonders will have no regulatory
accountability.

Instead, "treatment" will start with a voluntary agreement signed by
an addict who may also have other serious mental afflictions on top of
addiction. In no other part of society would a contract with such
people have any validity. In no other area of medical practice would
we allow untrained amateurs to pose as medical specialists.

As for validation, we are often told that this approach has somehow
worked in Europe. Exactly what city in Europe has anything similar to
the Downtown Eastside with 12,000 roaming addicts, many with mental
illnesses and violent criminal convictions? Exactly what European city
solved the problem by dispersing this problem to neighbourhoods?

This dangerous and futile experiment in treatment was given
credibility by Mayor Sam Sullivan and his two predecessors. Whatever
other attributes those gentlemen may have, their scientific and
medical expertise is precisely zero.

If a pandemic were to hit this city, you wouldn't want this trio and
their nameless staffers at City Hall prescribing the "medical" treatment.

Why are we giving any credence to their prescriptions for the drug
plague? I would have more confidence in the shift supervisor at
McDonald's.