SAFE HOUSE FOR DRUG USE GAINS SUPPORT

Advocates say communities benefit but residents are leery

What would it take to get Frank Coburn to quit crack cocaine?

A safe place to smoke it, he says.

A former Humber College professor, Coburn, 53, says there's no point in
police and communities looking on him and his crack-addicted friends as
criminals, vagrants, wastrels and evil.

``We are good people - with an addiction,'' he says.

A safe house would mean he and other addicts could stop ``the cruel life''
of running and hiding in back alleys and other people's doorways for their
hits.

Health care, social and street outreach workers would know where to go to
talk to drug users about taking care of themselves, getting a place to
live, and how to work toward quitting.

That's how Coburn sees himself and others kicking the habit.

As well, Coburn believes the addict would be less likely to come in contact
with HIV from needles, and the neighbourhoods where addicts shoot up,
solicit or steal could become safe places again for everyone.

A bona fide pipe dream?

Not to some of the 60 who gathered recently at Central Neighbourhood House
in the Dundas and Sherbourne Sts. area for a community forum sponsored by
All Saints church.

``It was one of the strongest and most organized calls for a safe house I
have seen,'' says Jim Hogan, a community police officer with 51 Division on
Regent St. in Regent Park.

The idea isn't bad, he adds.

``The police service is open to anything that would reduce all the negative
consequences (of drug usage) to the users and the community. I know what
we're doing now is not especially effective.''

The topic of the forum was harm reduction, a relatively new social policy
that is gaining worldwide popularity. Originally touted as a response to
the spread of AIDS through injection drug use, it can apply to all drug
use, including alcohol.

Harm reduction programs include needle and syringe exchanges, methadone
clinics, and injection rooms or safe houses - all methods of reducing
negative or dangerous health, social or economic effects of drug use.

They don't necessarily require a reduction in use, but they can lead to
decreased use, nonetheless.

Toronto's Seaton House recently established a wet hostel where residents
are allowed alcohol they buy themselves under controlled circumstances.

The report on its first year of operation was a rave, noting many residents
were drinking considerably less than on the streets.

And in a significant policy shift, the mayor's task force on homelessness
recommends establishing two harm-reduction facilities - one for alcohol and
another for drugs.

The three-year-old Toronto Harm Reduction Task Force is solidly behind the
idea of a safe house, and the city's public health sector supports the
concept of harm reduction as well, says Alice Gorman, a public health nurse
who was the city's liaison with the task force.

But it's shaping up to be a hard sell among many local residents.

Madelyn Webb is a member of the Toronto East Downtown Residents
Association, the group that operates street patrols to run drug dealers out
of their part of town.

``We want to reduce the demand for product from drug dealers and we want to
see (drugs) sold under controlled circumstances, like alcohol,'' she says.

A safe house wouldn't necessarily accomplish either, but she isn't totally
against the idea.

``It depends on the location; it has to be away from the residential
area,'' she says.

But the chair of 51 Division's community police liaison committee says he
doesn't want a safe house anywhere in the neighbourhood.

``It's just going to attract more drug dealing,'' says Cameron Atkison, who
is also a member of the Seaton, Ontario, Berkeley Residents Association.
``And we're doing everything we can to build this into a safe, welcoming
neighbourhood.''

Fran Dolan, a resident of the east-end community known as old Corktown,
near Cabbagetown, says drug dealers and users ``infringe on all a
neighbourhood's rights'' and she resents the way the drug trade attracts
street prostitution.

``I don't think a shooting gallery is the answer,'' Dolan says.

The Corktown Residents and Business Association has already written to
Toronto City Council to say so.

But they are up against some staunch supporters of harm reduction as a
sensible alternative to the failed ``Just say No'' thrust of the war on drugs.

The Toronto-based Canadian Foundation for Drugs Policy supports educational
programs, needle exchanges and safe houses for drug use.

Europe supports the use of safe houses. There are five Safe Injection
Houses in Germany, 13 in Switzerland and several in Holland.

A report by the New York-based Lindesmithe Centre found public drug use was
down in Holland where there are safe houses and community complaints were
down dramatically in Germany.

``It brings marginalized people into contact with health care and reduces
public scenes of drug use,'' says Bud Osborn, a member of the
Vancouver/Richmond Health Board of British Columbia and a former drug user.

The co-ordinator of a needle exchange program in Bridgeport, Conn., says
authorities must stop treating addicts as criminals.

``This is a public health issue,'' says Mark Kinzly. ``We're judgmental if
we look at drug users as different from ourselves,'' he says.

He also wonders how society can label crack cocaine as its most addictive
drug, then do nothing about providing treatment for it.

``One of the best ways to treat is to have a safe place for it,'' he says.

Frank Coburn calls crack cocaine Uncle Charlie. ``A very devious man,'' he
says ruefully.

Coburn is in a restaurant, fiddling with a piece of toast. Because he
``partied'' the previous night away, he never made it back to claim his
place at the Good Shepherd hostel and missed a media interview. ``(Uncle
Charlie) plans an agenda and screws up your priorities.''

On the other hand, he says, if he'd been boozing instead of smoking crack,
he'd be reeling, retching or passed out.

Instead, Coburn is natty and coherent, eyes clear and steady as he talks
about his addicted life.

``I've lost every material thing I owned - except my integrity, which
sometimes takes a shellacking,'' he says.

It began in 1996 when he lost his job, his brother died of AIDS, and his
wife walked out, taking their 8-year-old daughter.

He began keeping company with hookers, then he began keeping company with
the drug of hookers.

Within three weeks, he was addicted, he says, spending everything he owned
on all-night binges.

Very soon, the townhouse was gone, the RSPs cashed in, the stereo and
middle-class trappings pawned or stolen by his crackhead friends.

Homeless, Coburn slept on a log in the bushes at Richmond and Parliament
and on a bench in Moss Park. He's proud, says it was proof of overturning
the ``shackles of middle-class status to which I will never return.''

But also, in many ways, which he has never left.

Three weeks ago, he saw a notice for the inaugural meeting of the Illicit
Drug Users Union of Toronto (pronounced defiantly as I Do It) and now he is
a persuasive and pervasive spokesperson for them.

Coburn is serious about getting a safe house in Toronto. And he says he's
going to clean up his act to lobby hard for one.

He's signed up for a three-week treatment program in Elliot Lake.

He's tried to get off the habit twice before, but this time, he says, he
has real motivation - a house where crack addicts could finally be home,
safe.