END WAR ON DRUGS, CONFERENCE CONCLUDES

Health-care specialists gathering at the first international meeting on
Preventing Heroin Overdose agree that cities must turn their focus to the
needs of users and expand 'harm-reduction' strategies.

SEATTLE -- Vancouver and other B.C. cities must assume responsibility for
their drug problems and not wait for provincial or federal initiatives,
according to health-care specialists from around the globe.

At the first international conference on Preventing Heroin Overdose:
Pragmatic Approaches, the consensus was that North American cities must
abandon the War on Drugs and push for more treatment and services.

Public health officials said a range of measures is usually required that
could include safe injection sites, providing addicts with Naloxone (a drug
used to counter the effects of an opiate overdose), and prescription heroin
programs.

"Significant action must be taken -- cities need to develop drug policies
for their communities," said B.C. medical health officer Perry Kendall, who
was one of more than a dozen representatives from the province attending
the conference. "It's not a rural problem."

Kendall was adamant that a lot more can be done and should be done in
Vancouver to prevent the deaths and social disorder that result from drug
addiction, without waiting for action or support from senior levels of
government.

"There are a huge number of reasonable, feasible actions that could be
taken to significantly reduce the number of deaths and the public
disorder," he said.

"Cities such as Frankfurt, Amsterdam and Bern all experienced the same kind
of neighbourhood disruption, public disorder that we're seeing in the
Downtown Eastside. They took concerted action and have increased civic
order and safety, reduced crime, improved health and reduced death rates."

He said increased access to methadone and more counselling and support
services are immediate steps that could be taken and that safe injection
sites are something "we should be looking at more seriously than we are
because they seem to work."

"We have to sit down and work together. Otherwise, I think you could quite
rightly point a finger and say this is therapeutic abandonment by the civic
government, abandonment by the regulators and by the treaters and by the
agencies out there to advocate on behalf of the addicts."

B.C. coroner Larry Campbell echoed the need for quick, concerted action.

"Somehow we have to get rid of the [political] polarization in this area,"
Campbell said. "At the moment, the right wing says everybody with a habit
should go away and die and the left wing says everybody should be able to
get anything they want. That's hurting people who need care."

The two-day event at the glittering Sheraton Hotel in downtown Seattle drew
more than 400 doctors, police officers, public-health officials,
politicians and addicts.

Expensively suited, well-heeled medical professionals milled about
discussing drugs, doses, political strategies and first-aid emergency
responses with tattooed ex-cons and young people with multi-coloured hair.

The conference was sponsored by the Lindesmith Center, a U.S-based drug
policy lobby group and think-tank, various Washington State agencies, and a
handful of B.C. groups including the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board.

Besides Kendall and Campbell, attendees from B.C. included Vancouver social
planner Donald MacPherson, Health Board executive Jack Altman, NDP cabinet
minister and Downtown Eastside MLA Jenny Kwan, Vancouver police officer Ken
Frail and members of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users.

"My head's swimming," Frail said after attending several of the sessions.
"I wish more of us [police officers] had a chance to come, because I hadn't
realized just how big a problem this is."

In his presentation, Campbell said that while he was once an RCMP officer,
he has changed his mind about the efficacy of using the criminal law to
combat drug use. Still, he was not prepared to go as far as those who, like
Toronto-based outreach worker Cheryl White, advocated legalization and a
host of measures to give health resources directly to addicts.

"Interdiction and enforcement play some role," Campbell said, but a new
approach is essential.

Doctors and public-health officials told the meeting that aside from the
tragedy that is occurring, huge amounts of tax money are wasted by failing
to treat addiction as a health problem.

Addicts are "chronic patients," they said, who arrive in emergency wards
far more often than the rest of the population and as a group require far
more extensive treatments.

"We want to reduce the deaths and the costs," said Ethan Nadelmann,
director of the Lindesmith Center and the most vocal U.S. proponent of
so-called harm-reduction policies. "We could cut heroin overdoses in half
if the information from this conference were widely disseminated."

Staff from Vancouver's St. Paul's Hospital, a partial sponsor of the event,
have identified the needs of the Downtown Eastside addict population (which
is estimated at perhaps as many as 8,000) as one of the main reasons the
hospital is in a financial crisis.

"Cities have to take control of drug policy and we need this kind of
research data to make these decisions," MacPherson said. "We need to have a
sane public discussion."

B.C.'s addict population is estimated at between 10,000 and 15,000, most of
whom live in the Lower Mainland. Overdose deaths in B.C., Campbell said,
skyrocketed from 39 a year in 1988 to 412 a year in 1998.

Some European countries and Australia responded to their rising death toll
by changing the focus of their urban police forces to target dealers rather
than users, while expanding the kinds of health services available to
junkies: providing safe rooms in which to fix, making heroin and other
drugs available by prescription, distributing free needles and increasing
social services for those who want to kick their habit.