Pete McMartin:
Drug users need treatment, not jail, veteran police officer says

Pete McMartin Vancouver Sun

In yesterday's column, I wrote of the experiences of a Vancouver cop
who, maintaining his anonymity, spoke of the frustrations he felt in
his work tracking "career criminals." These are criminals who return
to commit crimes time after time because of their involvement with
drugs.

There are hundreds of files, he said, on such criminals, and their
number is growing daily. In the face of this, he has had to face
continuous budget cuts from governments looking to save money.

But politics are beyond his control. His frustrations arise from the
futility of his work: He can catch the thieves, only to see the courts
dispense such light sentences that the criminals are soon back on the
street.

"You can see a drug trafficker get a fine of $500 the price of
doing business."

Surprisingly, he does not blame the courts at all.

"I think it's shortsighted to blame the judges or prosecutors. I
think they're tremendously overworked. They might want to get more
people off the street, but the reality of the situation is the jails
are overcrowded as it is. The prisons are having to doublebunk. They
just can't put any more people in them."

In fact, he has come to the conclusion this isn't a criminal problem.

"It's a medical problem, really. The people that are dependent on
drugs are not getting the treatment they need. So we might arrest
them, but then when they get back out on to the street, they have to
support $100 or $300 or $500aday habits. These addicts are
released without any treatment at all. When you figure they might get
10 cents on the dollar for the goods they steal, you can imagine how
much merchandise they have to steal to support their habit."

No wonder, he said, Vancouver has one of the highest propertycrime
rates in North America, and that the rate is growing. The drugs are
everywhere.

How to break the cycle?

"There's got to be some kind of enforced medical treatment for
addicts," he said. "We can catch them, but unless they have a chance
to kick their habits while off the street, the problem's not going to
go away."

Enforced medical treatment is not a new idea. In 1978, the then Social
Credit government introduced the Heroin Treatment Act, which called
for enforced heroin addiction treatment. Under the Act, police would
have been able to hold suspected addicts without a warrant, as long as
the individual was brought before an evaluation panel and a decision
on commitment to a heroin treatment centre was made within 72 hours.
If the panel unanimously judged the individual to be addicted, he or
she could face up to six month's detention as part of an overall
threeyear treatment plan.

The Act caused an uproar. Civil libertarians howled about infringement
of freedoms. This newspaper ran an editorial calling it "a dangerous
form of imprisonment." Provincial Conservative leader Vic Stephens
suggested the B.C. government may be "bad Canadians" in proposing the
plan and that if he were a drug addict, "I would certainly get out of
B.C." (And we wouldn't want to give drug addicts the impression that
we didn't want them here, do we?) And the former New Democratic Party
attorneygeneral Alex Macdonald said he doubted if it would stand up
in court.

He was right. In 1979, the courts found the provincial government did
not have the constitutional authority to operate the plan. The health
minister of the day, (and future soap box orator) Rafe Mair, professed
he was at a loss.

"I don't know what I'm going to do," he was quoted as saying,
uncharacteristically chagrined. "I haven't got any ideas at this
point."

Neither, at this point, does the cop. The drug addiction problem is
vastly worse today than it was in the late 1970s.

And the lack of resolve of the provincial government to address the
problem its failure, for instance, to act on the recommendations of
the Vince Cain report on narcotics offers little hope to a public
besieged by property crime.

"We're never going to stop this problem unless we get these [addicts]
treatment and give traffickers really stiff sentences."

As for the police, he said, they have reached in their war on drugs a
point of unsettling equilibrium, a strategic deadend where the best
they can hope for is breaking even.

"We're stuck."

Pete McMartin can be reached at 7322905 or, on email, at
pmcmartin@pacpress.southam.ca