DRUG PROBLEM DEMANDS LEADERSHIP

Council Should Develop A Comprehensive Plan To Provide Addicts With Care
And Treatment

Downtown business owners and residents are demanding action from Victoria
City council to deal with the "urgent crisis" caused by the druggies who
lie about in the Johnson Street parkade and shoot up in front of passersby.
They're fed up with the drug-users' detritus -- needles, syringes, condoms,
blood and feces -- around them and what the unkempt squatters wrapped in
blankets are doing to their businesses and property values.

They want the police to get rid of these unpleasant people with their dirty
habits and say they deserve action because they pay so much in property taxes.

Mayor Alan Lowe asks them to be patient. The city, he says, plans to
increase security patrols at the parkade, paint the walls white and improve
the lighting, as if he thinks the denizens of the damp concrete tunnels can
be embarrassed into behaving better.

They can't, of course, and Lowe stresses that anything the city can do
there is only a Band-Aid solution to what is a complex problem. He says,
rightly, that there are much wider social issues -- such as how to help
addicts -- and that they are to be discussed at a meeting between council
members and the Vancouver Island Health Authority this week.

Good. There seems to have been a reluctance at City Hall, and in other
parts of the community, to start talking openly about what may not yet be a
crisis, but what is certainly a problem. It's not enough to say, as Lowe
has, that Victoria's drug addiction problem is nothing like the one in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, or that the Johnson Street parkade is the
only one of the four owned by the city where there have been complaints.

Many of those complaining about the druggies are concerned only with
getting them out of their neighbourhood. Lowe says they need care as well,
and that governments have to allocate the resources to provide it.

Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell was elected on a platform of treating drug
addiction in the Downtown Eastside as a health issue. He's been talking
about safe injection sites, even providing cocaine for the core of users
who will never be able to break the habit.

Victoria police Chief Paul Battershill takes a far more enlightened
attitude to drug addiction measures than his colleagues in the Canadian
Police Association, who think the enforcement-and-prevention regime works
just fine. Battershill thinks there should be safe injection sites in
Victoria, but only as part of a wider program to provide care and treatment
for addicts who, he says, "deserve" compassion.

None of this is easy, of course, quite apart from raising the ire of people
who still think addicts should be swept off the street, into jail or
somewhere else, and forgotten about.

It's estimated there may be as many as 2,000 intravenous drug users around
Greater Victoria, and the Vancouver Island Health Authority reports it is
serving more than half that number at any given time by treatment,
detoxication, counselling and other services.

Many addicts, though, don't want help in kicking their habit -- they're
caught up in a daily struggle to deal with the pain of their addiction
through the relief that drugs provide. Safe injection sites, it's argued,
might allow addicts to focus more on the longer term and seek treatment,
but they won't do that for every addict.

There is also the question of what level of government will pay for the
sites, and where they will be set up.

They have to be close enough to where the addicts are now -- because some,
apparently, won't walk more than a few blocks to use them -- and are sure
to attract others. Victoria would have to designate its own Downtown Eastside.

If these kinds of decisions are not made, the druggies themselves will go
where they will, and when the police roust them out of the parking garages
and other places where they lurk, they will go somewhere else they're not
wanted. Right now, they seem to have claimed, not only the Johnson Street
parkade, but the block around City Hall and parts of Fernwood, too.

Police should be dealing with the druggies, like any other people, who do
what they shouldn't in public. But we need a more proactive approach from
our civic leaders to look after them once the cops have moved them on.