POLITICAL SPAT MUST NOT STALL DRUG REPORT RECOMMENDATIONS

Parliament's Special Committee on Non-Medical Use of Drugs confirmed Monday
that Canada isn't about to take up arms in the U.S.-led war on drugs, but
committee members do seem to be at war with each other.

After spending $500,000 and 18 months traveling across Canada and to
several European cities, the committee issued 39 recommendations concerning
treatment, enforcement and harm reduction. They include pilot
safe-injection sites in Vancouver, Toronto and Montreal; the creation of a
national drug commissioner; funding treatment programs with proceeds of
property confiscated from drug dealers, and the creation of two specialty
prisons for drug addicts.

The committee is also expected to recommend later this week the
liberalization of Canada's marijuana laws.

Not surprisingly, most of the controversy stems from the proposed harm
reduction measures, in particular the call for supervised-injection sites.
Oddly, most of the controversy comes from within the committee itself.

Labelling the facilities "shooting galleries" and "harm extension"
measures, Canadian Alliance MP and committee vice-chair Randy White
condemned the recommendation even before the report was released.

Mr. White said that in his tour of similar programs in Europe, he saw
"human carnage for blocks, as well as a substantial gathering of addicts
and pushers in areas where trafficking and using were reluctantly permitted."

But Mr. White need not trouble himself with venturing all the way across
the Atlantic; he need only look in his own backyard, where human carnage
and drug dealing are part of the very fabric of the Downtown Eastside in
spite of, or perhaps because of, the lack of safe-injection sites.

The committee's recommendation will, no doubt, come as welcome news to
Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell, who campaigned on the promise to establish
injection facilities by Jan. 1. In an effort to make good on that promise,
Mr. Campbell has said he has identified several groups who could develop
the sites, which he maintains would not run afoul of the law.

That conflicts somewhat with guidelines recently issued by Health Canada,
which claimed that, thanks to international drug control conventions,
safe-injection facilities are illegal unless they form part of a scientific
study. The guidelines will be completed next week at a meeting of the
Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse.

The uncertainty surrounding the legal status of the sites is indicative one
of the main problems the committee's report was meant to address: the lack
of a coherent Canadian national drug policy.

To that end, the recommendations go far beyond safe-injection sites.
Although they receive the most attention, only 10 of the 39 recommendations
concern harm reduction.

One of the most important is the call for a national drug commissioner.
According to the report, the commissioner would not be modelled after the
U.S. drug czar, but would report to Parliament on the implementation of the
new drug policy and ensure that it is complete, consistent and coherent.

And that's precisely what Canada, especially Vancouver, urgently needs.

For far too long, Vancouver's four-pillar strategy has been foundering,
thanks largely to government apathy and inaction. The report could finally
help Vancouver rescue itself from the scourge of drug addiction.

But first, Ottawa must accept the recommendations and act on them without
delay.

Unfortunately, while the Liberals have the power to do whatever they want
with the report, the committee's bickering and infighting provides a recipe
for inaction -- a convenient excuse should the government once again prefer
to do nothing while people continue to die in the streets.