ANOTHER DIES AS A FOOLISH POLICY ENDURES

VICTORIA - The most bizarre thing about the overdose death of an RCMP
drug expert is our shock.

In the courts they call it wilful blindness, and it's no defence.
There's no other way to explain our willingness to see drug users as
some other species of tragic, wasted figures on downtown sidewalks.

Constable Barry Schneider had a wife and two young children. He was a
23-year RCMP veteran who worked on drug abuse prevention from the
Courtenay detachment. No one can explain how he ended up dead of a
heroin overdose.

As if it's easy to explain how more than 3,000 other people in B.C.
died of drug-induced causes since 1994, when then chief coroner Vince
Cain reviewed the heroin problem. He recommended more treatment
facilities; more detox centres and sustained help for recovering
addicts. Most fundamentally, he recommended treating addiction as a
health issue, not a criminal one, including a recommendation that we
prescribe heroin to people who can't quit. The report was largely
ignored, although needle exchanges received more money.

Dr. John Millar, then B.C.'s chief medical officer, completed another
report on injection drug use in B.C. in 1998. "Heroin in itself is not
particularly devastating," he found. What does more harm is the
struggle to get enough money to buy it, the varying purity and
dangerous additives and the sharing of needles, which has lead to an
HIV and hepatitis epidemic.

Dr. Millar called for a provincial substance abuse commission to
replace the fractured efforts spread across several ministries, an
immediate 50-per-cent increase in detox spaces and free methadone. And
he too proposed a test of providing legal heroin for those who
qualify. A similar experiment had already been conducted with
Switzerland's 1,100 addicts. During the test, there was a massive
reduction in criminal activity and an increase in employment -- and
not one overdose death. More than 80 people even quit drugs while
using free legal heroin.

Those recommendations were also basically ignored. The provincial
government has made a late and very small effort at expanding detox
facilities, but they remain hopelessly inadequate.

Drug-induced deaths -- overdoses, suicides and other causes -- killed
385 people in B.C. in 1999, more than motor vehicle accidents. Yet the
government is making a major push to reduce road deaths and a
half-hearted stab at reducing drug deaths.

Of course the blame doesn't just belong to government. The number of
deaths is not far off the toll from breast cancer or prostate cancer,
but you don't see fund-raising runs or awareness campaigns about overdoses.

The real problem is that we don't care about these people. We dismiss
them as losers, crazies, weak. So politicians -- of all parties --
don't have to pay much attention. The government can under-fund
treatment services and methadone programs, so hopelessly long waiting
lists deter most people from getting help.

And it's safe for them to treat the drug problem as a neighbourhood
nuisance, rather than as a deadly tragedy.

It's a stupid response. Our approach keeps a huge criminal industry
alive, leaves addicts to steal or sell their bodies for drugs, denies
them the help they need and perpetuates an approach that has seen HIV
infections infect 25 per cent of intravenous drug users and Hep C 90
per cent.

We chose to spend on hospitals for the dying and police, not help.
(The Millar report found extending methadone therapy to 1,500 more
addicts, with counselling, would cost $6 million a year. It would save
$36 million in health care, policing and prison costs.) And it has not
worked.

It's also morally reprehensible. These aren't shadows on a downtown
street. They were our fathers and daughters, our friends and
neighbours, 15,000 people in B.C. who are at risk. Not only do we fail
to help them, the way we deal with the problem helps condemn them to
death.

Constable Schneider's nine-year-old daughter found her dad lying on
the kitchen floor last November, and ran for help. She's already had
to deal with his death, back when everyone thought he'd had a heart
attack. Now she has to figure out what it means that he overdosed.

What it means is that he died tragically, victim of perhaps one bad
decision on one bad day. He's not a different man, or a different
father, because of the way he died.

He's another among the thousands who have already died and thousands
who will to die until we begin treating drug use as a serious health
issue, not a criminal one. Until we begin to care.