CITY POLICE DIVIDED OVER WAR ON DRUGS

Odd Squad Co-founder, Vice Unit Head Back Four-Pillars Plan

Vancouver's Odd Squad members -- and police in general -- are at odds over
the strategies to use to tackle drug-addiction programs.

While Odd Squad spokesman and Vancouver police Constable Al Arsenault has
achieved media fame for campaigning vigorously against harm-reduction
approaches to addiction and suggested that a new "right-wing" police board
and mayor will put an end to what he thinks are the city's too-liberal
approaches, other officers who have walked the beat in the Downtown
Eastside disagree.

"Arresting people only solves one problem -- seeing them on the street.
There is no one simple solution," says Walter McKay, who was a founding
member of the Odd Squad along with Arsenault.

The Odd Squad is a group of police officers who got together several years
ago to document the damaging effect of drug addiction on young people in
the Downtown Eastside. The group, which eventually turned into a separate
legal entity in order to be able to accept donations towards its work,
produced a documentary called Through a Blue Lens and its members have
given dozens of public lectures.

McKay, who worked in the Downtown Eastside for eight years, said addiction
is an enormously complex problem -- and police officers, even though
they're the ones dealing with it, aren't qualified to come up with solutions.

"This is the problem. We have people who aren't experts coming up with the
answers."

McKay, who left the force in June to work on a PhD in law-enforcement
ethics, said he supports the city's four-pillars approach because it's the
approach that is recommended by people who do have expertise: health
researchers.

Personally, he said, he feels treating addiction as a health problem and
using harm-reduction strategies "is just common sense."

"As a society, we have a moral obligation to look after those who can't
look after themselves."

He said his experience with addicts showed him that addiction was just one
small part of their problems.

People who are addicted usually have no education, they've had awful things
in their lives that have turned them into psychological wrecks, and they
have no support system -- and then they're told to stop using the one
substance that gives them some pleasure.

"We say, 'You give up your heroin or your cocaine and you take your Grade 3
education and your fragile emotional state and you go work at McDonald's
and spend all the money you earn to rent some crummy place.' "

McKay said any rational drug-addiction strategy has to take all those other
issues into account.

McKay said police in general are divided on the issue -- just like the rest
of society.

Sergeant Doug Lang agrees.

"I think we fall into three camps. There's the traditional approach, the
liberal approach and some who hope this problem will simply disappear,"
says Lang, who worked in the Downtown Eastside for seven years before
moving to his current job as head of the vice unit.

Lang has achieved minor fame for his role in the recent documentary on
Vancouver's struggle over the drug-addiction issue, Nettie Wild's Fix: The
Story of an Addicted City. In the movie, he talks about his worry that harm
reduction is a "slippery slope."

But these days, he says, he believes that harm reduction has to be part of
the comprehensive, balanced plan that's needed.

"The more I look at this war-on-drugs approach, the more I don't think
that's an answer. I'm not comfortable with simply stepping up law enforcement."

Lang said his experience with addicts has been that most of them are decent
people, especially in comparison with the horror stories he now deals with
in the vice unit.

"They're not bank robbers, they're not raping our kids. You've got to put
it in perspective."

But, he says, Vancouver does need to find a new strategy -- a homegrown,
unique strategy -- for dealing with addiction because the city has the
worst problem in North America.

"We've got to try something."