PLAN FOR SAFE-INJECTION SITES IS ALL FULL OF HOLES

Voters are usually very smart people. But, I think those who voted for
Larry Campbell as Vancouver mayor because of his magic drug plan for the
Downtown Eastside are being very gullible.

The plan, featuring the immediate introduction of a "safe-injection site"
into the notorious drug ghetto, has more holes in it than Ottawa's
implementation strategy for the Kyoto accord.

It's full of greenhouse gas.

Don't just ask Alliance MP Randy White and U.S. drug czar John Walters, who
have warned that the site will simply attract more drug addicts to this den
of iniquity, centre of the welfare-fed junkie industry.

Ask Mary Reeves, the aptly named mayor-elect of Abbotsford.

The 52-year-old grandmom scored a far bigger upset on election night than
mayor-elect Campbell. After all, she had to beat out George Ferguson, who
had been in the mayor's chair for 31 years.

Reeves is the first to admit that Abbotsford, a mushrooming city of 120,000
with more than its fair share of prisons, is infested with downtown drug
dealers.

But she's taking a radically different approach to the problem than
Campbell and his give-them-the-poison gang from COPE/NDP.

For one thing, she opposes the safe-injection sites (rejected by Stockholm
and other major European cities) and other "harm-reduction" methods at a
time when government is cutting back on drug prevention, treatment and law
enforcement.

For another, she think it's a huge mistake to concentrate services for drug
addicts in one area, as is the case in Vancouver.

"How are we helping these people by creating a ghetto for them?" Reeves
asks. "Aren't we actually marginalizing them more by saying, 'We believe in
helping you, but we're going to just put you into this one area because we
don't want you anywhere else?'"

And this refreshing view is what got her into trouble this spring as
manager of the Abbotsford Downtown Business Association.

Reeves opposed plans by the Salvation Army to put a homeless shelter
alongside a "bridge" home for recovering addicts.

She said that having recovering addicts near active users was like putting
snakes into a snake pit, where they multiply.

That set off the politically correct crowd, and a handful of demonstrators
paraded around outside the ADBA office.

But single-mom Reeves didn't back down.

"Our downtown is riddled with drug dealers right now," she said. "So why
would you want to put somebody who is trying to recover in the middle of that?"

Reeves figures people are always looking for easy solutions: "And when it
comes to addiction, there is no easy solution."

There is a solution, however, even though it isn't currently politically
fashionable.

And that is to get the addicts to kick their habits by simply giving them up.