HEROIN CRISIS IS OUR OWN CREATION

We have fought it, forbidden it, demonized it and left its users to
die. And now we'd better deal with it, because heroin isn't going away.

The form that the "heroin problem" takes in B.C. these days is a death
a day from overdose, an epidemic of HIV/AIDS and hepatitis, hospital
emergency rooms clogged with homeless addicts in varying stages of
lousy health, almost 800 charges a year of trafficking and possession
creeping through the justice system, and a whole lot of misery. All
told, $95 million a year in direct costs.

Quite a mess. But as more sensible sorts have been pointing out for
the better part of a century, our cures are worse than the disease,

A heroin addiction will most definitely eat up all your money and ruin
your life. But there's nothing inherent in the drug itself that does
it - in fact, research studies and clinical trials over the years have
found that given adequate food, housing and heroin, an addict suffers
neither physical nor mental deterioration even after years of use.

But by targeting it as the consummate depravity, we've created a
monster. Heroin spawns crime, homelessness, sickness and death because
we've made it that way.

Heroin is created by heating morphine, the active ingredient in opium,
with an acetic acid such as vinegar. It converts back to morphine in
the body.

Back in the 1880s when opiates were not only legal in the U.S. and
Canada but widely available - Iowa had 3,000 grocery stores selling
them in those years - heroin was a popular drug among the educated
upper class and used for any number of maladies, even as a treatment
for alcoholism.

The issue that first got the authorities riled up was race, not drug
use. The white folk were mingling just a little too readily with the
Chinese railway labourers in the opium dens, and criminalizing opium
and its derivatives seemed like the easiest way to stop any
interracial friendships.

And so it began. Over time, society grew to see the heroin addict as
morally weal and despicable, never questioning such hypocrisy in an
era when all sorts of other addictive and dangerous drugs were being
trafficked via the liquor stores and prescription pads of the nation.

We continue to relegate addicts to the fringe, writing them off as
sickly losers and criminals. But if they're sick, it's because a
heroin habit of $100 a day leaves little for personal care. If they're
losers, it's because we deny them their jobs, rights and dignity. It
they're criminals, it's because they steal to afford the black-market
prices created by heroin's illegality.

Meanwhile, the very real problem being enslaved - to heroin or
anything else - goes all but unaddressed. There are 15,000 regular
users in B.C., but only 18 treatment beds for all of the capital
region and much of the Island, and 200 for Vancouver. The wait list is
50 people deep.

Worse, the relapse rates are tremendously high; some studies put them
at 95 per cent. Regular heroin use most definitely leads to a lifetime
of addiction, and our kids need to hear that. But convincing them will
take facts, not scare tactics.

Heroin use has not been eradicated by 100 years of police crackdowns
and moral outrage. In fact, it's thriving: Victoria Street Outreach
Services coordinator Claire Dineen collected 111,000 used needles in
her first year with the needle exchange back in 1994-95; in the last
fiscal year, she collected three times that.

We can tell ourselves that we just need a little more time, a few more
police. Or we can save lives and money and do it right, before another
century slips away.