ADDICTS' MD BLASTS SOCIAL HOUSING DOWNTOWN

If you want a job in the Canadian auto industry, you go to Windsor, Ont., a
tunnel ride from downtown Detroit.

But if you don't want a job and you want, instead, to become part of
Canada's thriving drug culture, you head to Vancouver, in and around the
Woodward's building.

So, it was fitting yesterday that Jack Layton used the century-old downtown
building as the centrepiece of his first tour of duty as federal NDP leader.

That's because the hulking structure is, in many ways, a symbol of the
becalmed state of the left-wing party, whose days as a supermarket of fresh
ideas have gone the way of the dodo.

Derelict and daubed with slogans, Woodward's is a convenient place for
railing against the world and hoisting placards.

But it's not nearly as good a spot to build "social housing" as the NDP farm
team at City Hall want you to believe.

At least that's if you believe drug addicts deserve a realistic chance of
shaking their addictions.

Just ask Dr. Stan de Vlaming, a veteran addiction physician who works daily
with downtown drug addicts.

"If you're trying to stay clean, off drugs, you can't do it in the Downtown
Eastside," he told me yesterday.

What the addicts need, de Vlaming suggests, is housing well away from
Vancouver's downtown drug supermarket -- certainly not in the Woodward's
building.

"I would not agree with increasing social housing in the Downtown Eastside,
unless it's for people who have never had a drug problem," he said.

"But for anyone who has had a drug problem or is struggling with a drug
problem, this area is absolutely the wrong area to be offering them any
social housing."

De Vlaming added: "Trying to put recovering addicts into social housing
where they walk out on the street and they're going to be offered heroin and
cocaine three times in walking down the block, that's just ludicrous."

He would like to see taxpayer money spent on "safe-supported" housing for
recovering addicts outside the Downtown Eastside, in other areas of the
Lower Mainland or the province. By "safe-supported," he said, he meant
"drug-free, where they're not living next door to a dealer, or there's three
dealers on the same floor."

The good doctor pointed out that, thanks to the current, "drug-tolerant"
philosophy, there are financial incentives for Downtown Eastside addicts to
remain in the area, as opposed to seeking treatment in outlying recovery
houses.

"We should be making the recovery houses and treatment options as attractive
as some of the drug-tolerant, social housing options that may inadvertently
facilitate drug use," de Vlaming said.

Not that de Vlaming thinks abstinence is the answer. Indeed, he favours
methadone treatment as a way of weaning addicts off heroin. And he doesn't
oppose the idea of safe-injection sites. "But I honestly believe that we
would be able to save more lives by putting that same amount of money into
first-stage recovery houses for the severely addicted of the Downtown
Eastside -- that offers them a way out."

As things stand, I believe, we're helping keep addicts addicted for the rest
of their lives. And we're holding out the famed W of the Woodward's building
- -- not to mention the prospect of NDP-style cradle-to-grave security -- as a
welcome sign.