WHALLEY REPRESENTS THE OTHER DRUG STRATEGY

While Vancouver Is Empowering Its Addicts, Surrey Is Trying To Get Rid Of
Drugs. Which City Is Right?

Mayor Bob McCallum, the White Knight of Whalley, is standing in the middle
of a street, posing for the cameras. It is raining something awful.
McCallum ignores the rain and smiles. Click, go the cameras. Click click.

The street is 135A, which, for some reason I am not quite sure of, has
become (a) Ground Zero for the Mayor's War on Drugs and (b) linked with the
rash of brutal home invasions of seniors' homes in Whalley. This isn't a
link McCallum has himself encouraged, because he recognizes that the
home-invader might simply be a run-of-the-mill psycho and not a drug
addict, but he isn't shy of taking advantage of it politically, either.

And so he here is, at my request, standing in the rain. There are at least
three television crews on the street, and several reporters, and several
weird-looking people skulking around, and a guy pushing a grocery cart full
of bottles and cans, and a neighbour walking two large pit bulls -- off
leash -- if that tells you anything about 135A. This is a street that needs
a muzzle.

Which McCallum is hoping to provide. Behind McCallum in the middle of the
street is a concrete barrier. It cuts the street in half. McCallum had it
put there to dissuade the street-racers, hookers, pimps, johns, junkies and
crack addicts that bedevil 135A, but at the moment of our interview, all it
was dissuading was the progress of a big guy named Bob in a pick-up truck
who had just come from an auto-wrecking company on 135A. Bob, solid
citizen, drives up, looks at the barrier with disgust and says, within
earshot of the television crews surrounding McCallum:

"What's this s--- supposed to accomplish?"

Well, Bob, McCallum might have said if he hadn't been basking in the glow
of television cameras, that remains to be seen. The grimy little stretch of
135A has become the mayor's centrepiece in his grand experiment -- an
experiment meant to stem, and even quash, the persistent, corrosive
existence of hard drugs in Whalley. The home invasions? They're a corollary
to what McCallum is doing on 135A, albeit an emotional one. Get rid of the
drugs, he reasons, and you get rid of a lot of Whalley's problems.

This sounds like logic at its simplest, but in the Lower Mainland it
constitutes a radical departure from the accepted and more liberal modes of
dealing with the drug culture. In Vancouver, which, for good or ill, now
leads the way in Canada, the city government isn't putting up roadblocks to
junkies -- it's empowering them. It has, in effect, waved the white flag,
saying here, here's a safe-injection site, here's social housing, here's a
neighbourhood of social services you can call your own. Just don't kill
yourself or anybody else. And who knows? Maybe it will work. Mayor Larry
Campbell has three years to prove it.

McCallum is taking a different tack. Surrey differs from Vancouver in two
important ways, he says:

"We don't believe in harm reduction, and we don't believe in safe-injection
sites."

McCallum is putting the onus of responsibility on the junkies -- if you
want help, we'll give it to you -- but in the meantime, he intends to make
things as uncomfortable for them as he can. He has hired more cops and
firemen, has sicced his bylaw boys on derelict houses and, borrowing a page
from former New York mayor Rudolf Guiliani's Broken Window philosophy, has
warned businesses on 135A that any graffiti must be cleaned up within 24
hours. The street itself has been cleaned up, and has been repaved and
given new sidewalks and curbs. He hopes cosmetics, to some extent, can be
the cure.

A particular target of McCallum's ire has been the needle exchange in the
the South Fraser Community Services building. The SFCS building, which is
in the middle of the block, offers several social services besides the
needle exchange, including a food bank and medical clinic. Next door to it
there used to stand a crack house. It is now a vacant lot, the city having
just recently torn it down.

So far, the city has torn down five such houses on the block, leaving its
landscape as gap-toothed as a junkie's mouth. McCallum saw the existence of
such houses as evidence of the needle exchange's pernicious influence on
the area. He believes it acts as a magnet to addicts.

"It's our only needle exchange in Surrey and it concentrates all the people
with drug problems in this area. Vancouver had the same problem with a
centralized needle exchange, so they decentralized. And that's what we
want. We've asked (the needle exchange) to leave and relocate into our
health units around the city and decentralize."

The folks at the needle exchange, however, don't happen to see things that
way, and say they aren't about to leave. Program director Linda Syssoloff
told me that most of her clientele don't actually live in the area, but
drive in, get their needles and leave. She also said most of her clients
are heroin addicts, while the people you see wandering the streets around
135A are crack cocaine addicts.

McCallum doesn't buy that argument and, in earlier interviews, threatened
to shut the needle exchange down if it didn't comply with his request.

It isn't clear how he might do that. The SFCS is funded by the provincial
government and the politician responsible for the needle exchange,
Surrey-Panorama Liberal MLA Dr. Gulzar Cheema, the minister of state for
mental health, told the Surrey Leader the exchange "isn't going anywhere."

Where this leaves McCallum is, well, in the same position Vancouver's Mayor
Larry Campbell is in -- which, for the moment, is in limbo. He is giving
his plan at least a year and proposes to take it one block at a time,
coordinating all the forces the city of Surrey can bring to bear upon the
problem.

Watching on the sidelines will be the constituents of both cities, to see
which of the two great experiments will work.

If McCallum's does, and he eradicates or lessens the drug problem in
Whalley, can you imagine how the long-suffering citizens of Vancouver might
feel as they regard the hundreds of millions of tax dollars being poured
into the Downtown Eastside?