WHY WE NEED SAFE-INJECTION SITES

When I last saw Gilbert Dallaire, he had been sucking back Listerine and
Alberto VO5 hairspray in a bank-machine lobby on View Street. He was drunk,
but not to the point where the cops were ready to run him into the cells,
as they do most nights.

Gilbert has had an eventful time since that night last month. On Dec. 30,
he almost drowned after tumbling into the Inner Harbour while bombed on
mouthwash. Passersby saved his life.

Then, after he got out of hospital, he was persuaded to check into the
Victoria Detox, which is where I bumped into Dallaire this week.

Gilbert has been drinking for 38 of his 54 years. Sometimes he has a place
to stay. Sometimes he drinks his way out of a home and winds up sleeping
rough, as has been the case for the past few months. "I'm getting too old
to sleep on the street," he says. "My bones hurt."

He had really hit the skids before checking into the detox. "I was even
drinking hairspray, Lysol, rubbing alcohol. Everything that I could put my
hands on, I was drinking it."

But he doesn't do drugs, and worries about the kids who shoot up downtown.
He tries to tell them about old friends who died that way, but the kids
simply say, "It's not going to happen to me." Yes, it will, says Gilbert.

Which, frankly, would suit a lot of people just fine. Many Victorians are
tired of picking their way through the street meat every time they go
downtown, of dealing with all the drug addicts, drunks, prostitutes,
wild-eyed crazies, panhandlers and bags of rags who sprawl across the
sidewalk with their dogs.

It all came to a head this month in the Johnson Street parkade, where
there's been a flood of complaints about addicts defecating and injecting
themselves. The city says it will add lighting, fencing and security to
keep them out. But then what? Where do they go next?

I say Uplands. Or North Saanich. Or maybe Broadmead. Poor old downtown
Victoria has already had its turn.

Well, tough luck, Victoria. This is a downtown culture. And since the
courts can't jail anyone for being a junkie, fining them won't do any good
and nobody can simply wish them away, there's going to have to be another
solution.

The easiest thing, if all we're worried about is getting the addicts out of
our faces and stopping them from stealing our stereos, is to give them free
drugs and a place to do them. Just like in Switzerland, where they have
safe injection sites and, in some cases, prescription heroin.

Simply shoving the street people out of sight would suit many Victorians
just fine, as even the most charitable among us get tired of continually
propping up the wounded. "I think we all suffer from compassion fatigue,"
says Gordon Harper, chairman of the Greater Victoria Drug and Alcohol
Rehabilitation Society, which runs the detox centre on Pembroke Street.

But then we have our better days, when fear and loathing gives way to
humanity, when we remember we're not talking about a pack of wild dogs.

"Most people don't grow up going 'I want to be a crackhead at the Johnson
Street parkade,'" says Patrick Reber, executive director of the Victoria
Detox. "They don't just fall from the sky, these folks. They're our
brothers and sisters."

But if our goal is to make those brothers and sisters better, not merely to
hose them into the harbour, the solution is trickier.

You can't beat or police addiction out of anyone. Some people don't want to
be saved. Addiction is a complicated illness, interwoven with other
personal demons and a lifestyle from which it's hard to break free. That's
one reason Harper and Reber favour safe injection sites; they see them as
neutral places at which health-care workers can engage addicts, perhaps
showing them a way out.

But that way out has to lead somewhere. Detox centres are the emergency
ward of addiction services. Once the substance abuser is ready to leave,
there's still the question of health care, income and, above all, housing.
A third of the people discharged from detox have no place to go. Another
third have no safe place. It's easy to default to the same old friends and
the same old habits.

Ask Gilbert Dallaire what will help keep him on the wagon and he says "I
have to move away from downtown. I need a place on my own. If I don't hang
around with the crowd downtown, I can stay sober for a long time."

Reber thinks Gilbert could use some kind of "anchored" housing, a place he
can call his own no matter what. A place from which he can't be evicted,
even when the wheels fall off. It might be cheaper in the long run, as he's
already chewing up a good chunk of the taxpayers' change, what with all the
cops, jailers, ambulance attendants and welfare workers trying to keep him
from falling through the social-safety net.

Ah, yes, money. Not a lot of it around right now, not unless they can
figure out a way to make the Johnson Street parkade an Olympic venue.

Which means we're still faced with the reality of substance abuse downtown.

"This is part of our community," says Reber, "whether we like it or not."