TIME TO DELIVER FOR DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE

Vancouver's mayor is right to pressure the federal and provincial
governments to stop talking about rampant drug addiction and crime in the
area and start providing overdue treatment services.

Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen called this week for a three-month halt on
permits and applications for facilities related to the Downtown Eastside
drug epidemic.

The mayor has been criticized on these pages many times, but when he's
right he's right. And this time he is, not only in our view, but also in
the eyes of the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board and Vancouver police.

Mr. Owen put the brakes on new facilities not because he doesn't believe in
drug rehabilitation programs or resource centres for addicts, but because
he doesn't believe in a piecemeal approach to the widespread problems.

The research backs him up -- the city's proposed "four-pillar approach" is
how every successful North American and European city has dealt with
similar troubles. They focus on prevention, treatment (rehabilitation),
harm-reduction and enforcement. And they understand that all the pieces
must be in place.

The mayor is also right to shift the onus to the provincial and federal
governments. Just over a year ago, Mr. Owen, Liberal MP Hedy Fry and local
MLA Jenny Kwan announced that their governments would work together to
tackle drug-related problems. The mayor has decided, with good reason, that
a year is long enough to wait for his colleagues in the senior governments
to actually do something.

The Downtown Eastside has an estimated 6,000 heroin and crack cocaine
addicts, 40 per cent of them believed to be HIV-positive. That's the
highest infection rate in the developed world. Vancouver/Richmond Health
Board declared the area a medical emergency more than three years ago. The
pricetag for taxpayers is already high and, if all those infected sought
treatment, the cost would be $100 million each year for drugs alone.

The number of addicts is the catalyst for a crime rate six times that of
the rest of the city. The area is so devastated -- federal Health Minister
Allan Rock called it "a bleak and desolate landscape" -- that business has
evaporated; each one per cent added to the commercial vacancy rate costs
the city $300,000 in lost revenue.

Meanwhile, the province has yet to act on its promise of $125 million in
new mental health services, another chronic problem in the Downtown
Eastside, and there is still a desperate lack of treatment and detox beds.

A year and a half ago, the province backed out of a plan to which it had
committed co-funding. Drug courts, which would give addicts a choice
between jail and rehab, are no closer now than when Premier Ujjal Dosanjh,
then the attorney-general, endorsed the idea nearly two years ago.

The spur for the mayor's decision came after a petition by Gastown and
Chinatown merchants, whose neighborhoods adjoin the Downtown Eastside. They
made the point that the goal should be to reclaim the area not just for the
sake of junkies, but for everyone, particularly the law-abiding residents
of the community who are now held under virtual house arrest in their own
neighbourhood.

That overdue reclamation cannot even start until Victoria and Ottawa
deliver more than promises. The mayor is right to demand they do so, and do
so now.