DRUG ABUSE NEEDS TO BE TACKLED ACROSS THE LOWER MAINLAND

Despite all the hype about safe-injection sites in downtown Vancouver and
all the mind-numbing chatter about mind-altering drugs, the Lower Mainland
seems to be having little success in battling drug use.

Just ask Andrea, 19, of Coquitlam, who last summer kicked a heroin and
cocaine habit (which she financed through robbery and other crime).

"It is getting worse, I admit that," she said. "But I think it's because a
lot of youth want to fit in with other people." Peer pressure, in other words.

Indeed, I'm told a soon-to-be published study of youth drug use in Surrey,
Delta and White Rock appears to show a rise in marijuana use and growing
problems with crystal meth.

Study co-ordinator Tom Hetherington of the Surrey-based Pacific Community
Resources Society won't divulge details of the study of a thousand
youngsters aged 12 to 24. But, based on its preliminary results and those
of a previous study the society did in 2002, rates of Lower Mainland teen
drug use do not appear to be falling, as they have elsewhere in North America.

Booze remains the No. 1 drug here, but increasingly our youth are going to pot.

"It's starting to look like marijuana and tobacco are fighting for second
place in terms of the most popular drug," Hetherington said.

All of which should be a call to arms for Lower Mainland parents worried
about their children having their minds and bodies polluted by poisonous
and potentially deadly substances.

It's time, in fact, that the plethora of public and private agencies we
have in the Lower Mainland buried their petty ideological differences and
embarked on a full-blown, regional crusade against drug use -- similar to
one that appears to have worked miraculously well in Miami.

Miami used to be known as the world's drug capital, home to the cocaine
cowboys. But in the past eight years, youth drug use in Miami-Dade County,
a region not unlike the Lower Mainland, has been reduced by 50 per cent.

At least that's according to Bob McCabe, chairman of the Miami Coalition
for a Safe and Drug-Free Community -- which, beginning in 1988, launched an
anti-drug blitzkrieg. With an annual budget of just $300,000 US, the
coalition helped co-ordinate everything from drug treatment to drug
education. "Every school in the county, including the elementary schools,
has at least one drug counsellor," McCabe told me.

OK, you'll say, we already have the Four Pillars program here. But, in my
view, it's far too drug-friendly and far too narrowly focused on the
downtown of the city of Vancouver.

After all, as Andrea says, the key to combatting teenage drug use is for
caring, clued-in people to help teens all over our mushrooming region to
appreciate just how un-cool it really is.