FOR A COCAINE ADDICT, SAFE SITES MEAN SAFER STREETS

His arms bear the scars of a $160-a-day cocaine habit. He presents them like
a doctor would hang a diploma on the wall -- needle tracks as credentials.
They're his proof of expertise as he expounds on the idea of a
safe-injection site.

"We would stay off the street and we would be safe," says the addict,
sitting on a bench in Centennial Square.

"There wouldn't be so many overdoses."

"If I had a safe place to inject, I wouldn't leave my rigs on the sidewalk
for the children to step on."

What about the honey pot effect? Wouldn't a supervised injection site just
attract and encourage users? "No, we're going to do it anyways," he replies.

Right now he has a place to live, so he does his drugs at home. But often
the needles come out in the square, the alleys, the parkades, the Vic West
end of the blue bridge and down by the mural they call the Whaling Wall. "A
lot of people on the street have nowhere to go, at night especially, so they
just shoot up outside."

Ten minutes later, just across the square, Mayor Alan Lowe is in his office,
talking about the same subject. He's joined by Dr. Richard Stanwick,
Vancouver Island's chief medical health officer. Police Chief Paul
Battershill is on the speaker phone.

Nobody is officially proposing a safe-injection site for Victoria, at least
not yet. But they're sure leaning in that direction. They talk of how it
would fit in with the four-pillars -- prevention, treatment, enforcement and
harm reduction -- approach to drug use.

It's been 16 months since Victoria city hall, the police and the health
authority began a co-ordinated effort to address the troubles downtown.
We've seen a crackdown on street-level dealing, the creation of a sobering
centre for chronic alcoholics, the expansion of the youth detox and the
groundbreaking for a psychiatric ward that will open this year.

Now they're pondering a supervised site similar to the one opened in
Vancouver last year. "At this point we're not proposing any facility,"
stresses Lowe.

Don't do anything without plenty of public consultation, was the advice he
got from former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen. That's one reason the public is
being invited to a 7 p.m. forum at City Hall tonight, where speakers will
discuss the first six months of the Vancouver experiment.

No one is pretending there's a magic solution. All sorts of issues are mixed
up downtown. Most of Victoria's homeless suffer from mental illness, and
many of those people are substance abusers, too. The location of an
injection site would be a land mine. (Uplands, anyone?) Lowe quotes Owen --
"drug dealers are evil and addicts are sick" -- but it's not so black and
white: Many of those sick addicts support their habits through prostitution
and petty crime. Can't ignore that.

Only a hardcore handful of users -- maybe a dozen of them, maybe 50 or 60 --
are responsible for most of the needles scattered downtown, but there are
plenty of other people smoking crack and crystal meth in public places. What
do you do with them? "It may very well be a safe-consumption site," responds
Lowe.

Stanwick speaks enthusiastically of the health benefits of such a facility.
Even the hard-hearted should see the economic gain of keeping addicts out of
expensive hospital beds, he says.

Battershill is a bit less certain. "I guess I'm cautiously supportive." He
doesn't want dealers to think it's a free ticket.

"We're not stepping away from enforcement." But he's encouraged by the early
word from Vancouver, where open drug use is down and the injection site
hasn't been a magnet for trouble.

Lowe, whose office gives him a ringside seat to the existing street circus,
seems willing to try a new approach -- but only if the public is onside.