POLICE: DRUG MARKET DOWN DRAMATICALLY POLICE

Deputy Chief Decries Report That Says Crackdown Hasn't Affected Drug Use

VANCOUVER - A senior Vancouver police officer has defended a one-year
police crackdown on Downtown Eastside drug dealing, saying it has
dramatically reduced the open drug market at Hastings and Main.

According to researchers at the B.C. Centre for Excellence in
HIV/AIDS, interviews with drug addicts before and after the
enforcement initiative began in April 2003, showed the percentage of
people using heroin or cocaine remained almost unchanged.

Their study, published Tuesday in the Canadian Medical Association
Journal, found that adding 40 officers in the city's poorest
neighbourhood has also had no direct, measurable impact on the price
or availability of the illegal hard drugs.

Instead, the researchers concluded, the crackdown has dispersed drug
dealing across a much wider area of the Downtown Eastside, which has
the potential to attract new drug users and to increase infection
rates for HIV and other blood-borne diseases that addicts spread when
they share needles.

But Vancouver police Deputy Chief Bob Rich said police have made the
streets safer for the 10,000 residents of the Downtown Eastside who
don't use drugs but have to live with drug-related violence.

"If our goal was to reduce the amount of drugs used by longtime
intravenous drug users who live in the Downtown Eastside, we would
have to admit that we failed," Rich told journalists at police
headquarters.

"I could also say, a little lightly, if our goal had been to find
Jimmy Hoffa [the long-missing U.S. Teamsters union leader whose body
has never been found] in the Downtown Eastside, we would also have to
admit we failed."

"But neither one of those things were our goal. Our goal was to
restore order to a community in crisis, and that's what we've done."

Rich offered no new facts to substantiate that assertion, but said
police information on the number of violent and disorderly incidents
on the street will form part of another study to be released at the
end of May. He also said fewer "drug tourists" from other cities or
provinces are coming to Vancouver to buy and use drugs.

When the crackdown began a year ago, one of the agencies that
distributes sterile hypodermic needles to addicts to slow the spread
of blood-borne diseases like AIDS and hepatitis began collecting used
needles from addicts they hadn't seen in years.

Judy McGuire, executive director of the Downtown Eastside Youth
Activities Society, said that before the crackdown, those longtime
addicts used to remain locked in their hotel rooms when evening came,
because they were afraid to go out on the street.

"The level of victimization, violence and dealing on the street all
went down," McGuire said.

On the other hand, DEYAS vans began spending more time in other city
neighbourhoods collecting used needles, because McGuire said more drug
users and traffickers had moved to areas such as the south downtown,
the West End and Commercial Drive neighbourhoods.

"You simply had to read the news or talk to residents or people who
owned businesses in those areas to know that for them, the situation
has gotten worse," she said. "Some of it has dispersed in the city.
Some has dispersed to other parts of the Lower Mainland, to Burnaby,
New Westminster or Surrey. It's always been a fairly mobile
population, and the dealers will move wherever they think their
customers are."

Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, who helped develop Vancouver's
"four-pillar" approach to drug problems, said he was disappointed the
study gave the impression no progress has been made in the Downtown
Eastside.

"Everyone says that in the last three months, the last six months,
it's been a lot better there."