NO RIGHT, WRONG IN DRUG DEBATE

From the Points Being Made From Chinatown to Kerrisdale, Whether In
Support of Safe-Injection Sites or Not, What Is Clear in The Discussion Is
That There Are Only Victims

George Chow is an independent candidate running for Vancouver city council,
and he is an oddity. He does not believe in safe-injection sites.

Chow also entertains the quaint notion -- in this Age of the Universal
Victim -- of personal responsibility. That is, in the case of heroin and
cocaine addiction, for example, he believes that if you indulge, you must
first knowingly break the law, and if you continue to indulge, you must
knowingly be taking your life in your hands. There is premeditation there,
he seems to be saying, and a price to pay.

I know. Outdated, isn't it?

Chow admits to this.

"I appeal to the older folks, for some reason. Maybe my values are
old-fashioned."

Well, rare, anyway. In the prevalent, and opposing, view of addiction, the
issue of personal responsibility takes a back seat to genetic
predisposition -- that is, addicts aren't criminals, they're sick, and
can't help themselves. This doesn't entirely absolve the addict of blame,
but it's an argument a moralist like Chow can't win, either. It's bred in
the bones. How do you fight nature?

Chow, by the way, does not believe the price addicts should pay is
self-inflicted death. He isn't a monster. He believes in prevention,
counselling and treatment. But he doesn't believe in carte blanche.

"Personal responsibility means, in this case of drug users, that they have
to help themselves in order to be helped. They have to exhibit some desire
to be helped. And you can't just say, 'Hey, I'm a drug addict! Help me!
Feed me! Find me a job! Give me a place to sleep! Give me drugs!'

"First, drug addiction is illegal, and second, it's personal choice.

"But it's being turned into a health-care issue. And if it is, we better be
prepared to debate the cost of it."

Well, no one is, price being no object, it seems. Chow's concerns, anyway,
are more geographical in nature. He is campaigning against safe-injection
sites because he knows damn well where the first one will be going -- and
that's right next door to his old neighbourhood of Chinatown.

Chow grew up there after emigrating from Hong Kong (via China) in 1965.
Now, a senior engineer with B.C. Hydro, he lives in Shaughnessy.

But he's been loyal to his roots, and has served on committee after
committee trying to preserve the economic integrity of Chinatown. It has
been a losing battle. Most recently, he represented the Chinese Benevolent
Association in its fight to stop the creation of the Health Contact Centre,
a drop-in for addicts on the ground floor of the Roosevelt Hotel. It is
near Main and Hastings.

The CBA fought it on the grounds that Chinatown has put up with enough
crap, and the neighbourhood didn't want any more services that would
reinforce the addicts' hold on the area.

These complaints fell on deaf ears. The centre opened to great huzzahs in
December 2001, and Main and Hastings is the same zoo it always was. You can
go down to Chinatown on a Saturday night -- as I did recently -- and safely
shoot a cannon down its streets. You won't hit a soul, except maybe an addict.

Chow and I talked about this on Wednesday afternoon in his bare-bones
campaign office on Broadway. A couple of hours later, we bumped into one
another again at a town-hall meeting at St. Mary's Anglican Church in
Kerrisdale.

The evening had been sponsored by the From Grief To Action association, a
group that found its genesis among the parents of well-off west side
children who ended up addicts. I was told about 100 west-side families in
the group had been touched by addiction, and many parents had seen their
kids killed by drugs. Founded in 1999, the group now lobbies for needle
exchanges, safe-injection sites and harm reduction care.

Invited to speak were the three major mayoral candidates, all of whom had
declared their support for safe-injection sites in one form or another, so
it wasn't a night you were likely to hear a discouraging word. Three
hundred people crammed into the church's old gym to listen. George Chow
stood at the back.

It was a powerful evening, with several of the parents getting up and
giving short descriptions of the tragedies they have had to endure --
including one woman in pearls who stood up and said at the end of her
question to the candidates, simply, "And oh yes, my daughter, Alexandra,
died of an overdose." The words caught in her throat.

Each of the candidates promised action to varying degrees. Valerie MacLean
favoured consultation with neighbourhoods before installing safe-injection
sites, she said, but then said she would make them understand they were
doing it for the good of the city -- by which she meant, I presume, they
would get them whether they wanted them or not. Jennifer Clarke said she
favoured the installation of one after careful planning (and she would
later tell me she wasn't sure where, St. Paul's Hospital, possibly). Larry
Campbell said he would put one in as soon as possible, and in the Downtown
Eastside, where it was most needed.

Campbell also said he would put one in Kerrisdale if the need was there and
residents wanted it.

(Right. Here we were in St. Mary's Church, where a couple of decades
before, the neighbourhood tried to stop the church from building non-profit
housing for -- wait for it -- senior citizens. Now, a shooting gallery?
Kerrisdale may have changed in 20 years, but it hasn't changed that much.)

Campbell's promise to put the site in the Downtown Eastside brought the
only dissenting view of the evening, and that was from the inimitable
Roderick Lewis, of the Patient Empowerment Society, representing former
mental patients of Riverview hospital. Lewis, as is his wont, went off on a
long ramble, and almost got thrown out. But his point was cogent:

Thirty per cent of addicts in the Downtown Eastside, he said, are former
mental patients -- they turn to drugs because there is nothing for them to
do, and they are preyed upon by dealers. They are the real innocents in
this. And you want to put a shooting gallery down there for them, instead
of giving them places to live outside the hellhole?

"It's madness!" Lewis shouted.

He had a point. He had seen, he said, several of his own friends die of
overdoses.

George Chow, for his part, kept quiet. Later, in a foyer, Chow said he was
moved by the parents' stories, but unchanged in his opinions of
safe-injection sites.

"I think it's quite unfair," he said, "for one community to have to supply
all the facilities for those people of other communities whose kids have
gone astray."

And he, too, had a point, which is the thing about this issue:

There is no right or wrong, only victims -- from those who just want to
live in their neighbourhoods, to those who end up dying in them.