ADDICTS DEFEND CRACK PIPE POLICY

Some recovering addicts are now defending local harm-reduction
services, such as the needle exchange, in the wake of another former
addicts criticisms that they don't really help.

Two former full-time drug users, who are now productive members of
society, say services such as the needle exchange, methadone
prescriptions and clean crack pipes are preventing even more social
decay than what we are witnessing in the area today.

"The crime rate would go up without the needle exchange," said a woman
we'll call Anita, who used to work for organized crime as a crackshack
operator.

"I totally agree with the needle exchange. I was born into a life of
drugs, I had close relatives who were heroin addicts and I got hooked,
too. Kids in all walks of life get hooked, but it is important to have
a place you can refer them to where they can do something about
getting their lives turned around again, have a place they feel safe,
have a place with a nurse, a place that understands and isn't judging
them, but is trying to look out for them."

She said the public could expect break-and-enters and car thefts and
muggings to go up, if it weren't for the services. She added there
would be more sex workers forced out on the street, more beatings over
debts and territory, more crackshacks in neighbourhoods, and there
would be direct targeting of doctors' and pharmacists' and
veterinarians' homes and offices, all to get the needles they need and
whatever else they could score as well.

A former addict we'll call Henry, agrees wholeheartedly. He almost
smoked himself into financial ruin, and his family along with him. He
was stealing things from his relatives and friends to pay for his
constant habit, until they intervened at a rare moment of lucidity and
he took their offer of help. He has been drug-free almost ever since
thanks to constant help. Some people don't have such influential loved
ones, he said, and that's where a social safety net has to step in.

"I've agreed with the harm reduction approach from the start, but I
now know it has to be part and parcel with a collective program,"
Henry said. "You need the police on board, you need the health care
community on board. You need a community of experiential people on
board, you need the public at large to buy in and believe in it. You
have to explain the goals first, all the benefits, educate people
about what the costs are of not having an effective program to reduce
harm. You have to demonstrate the social and the fiscal advantages of
it, they are absolutely there so it shouldn't be too hard, but I have
not seen that correct approach in this city. This satanic ignorance
that I see in this town is only going to make the situation worse.
'It's not going to touch me or my family, and we shouldn't help people
because they did this to themselves' is satanic ignorance."

He stressed that the point of the needle exchange and crack pipes in
particular is not and never has been to somehow get addicts off of
drugs. The primary purpose is, and it is a real threat in his
experience, is to curb the spread of diseases.

"Hep C (hepatitis) and HIV and AIDS will, sooner or later, jump over
from the drug users to mainstream families," he said. "Part of that
satanic ignorance is not realizing that there are all kinds of contact
points between those two worlds, there is no 'us and them,' and when
it does jump you'll have a real problem to contend with. You can have
dozens of people, hundreds of people, infected before you realize the
first one is, and by then you can't backtrack. You can't discover the
source. You can't do anything except try to deal with the infected
people as they show up, and they are still spreading it to others all
the while. It cannot be allowed to jump into schools and families. It
cannot. You must deal with this by putting the whole force of policy
into the harm reduction model."

We already do in so many cases, he said. The counterattack campaign
against impaired drivers, the warning labels on cigarettes, the
gambling helpline signs at casinos, these are all harm reduction tools
already in action. They are actions that accept someone is taking part
in an activity they know is harmful but they are involved in it anyway
and they need society's help.

"There are a lot of really good people mixed up in drugs," said Anita.
"Some people in the drug world have no morals, but a lot are worth
saving, worth spending time with. I heard (in a recent Citizen story)
about addicts breaking needles off in playgrounds and parks and I tell
you, heaven help anyone I ever was with if they did something like
that. A lot of people in that world would do that, I know, but a lot
of us still had honour and still knew what morals were. The reason you
do the drugs is because you have morals, and something so terrible has
happened to you or something so bad has been lost that you do it to
forget or fill that void. There is goodness in those people."

Anita is on the methadone program in Prince George and says she
intends to be for the rest of her life. It's like a diabetic needs
insulin, she explained, the methadone takes the edge off her heroin
cravings without all the nasty ups and downs. For that she is
grateful, or she probably wouldn't have made it through and by now all
kinds of terrible things could have happened to her in the street
world, she said.

Henry was to the point he had lost his occupation, been alienated from
most of his family and was inhaling upwards of $80 per day in crack
cocaine, a total that was set to skyrocket and in the process send him
straight into the gutters and alleys, he said. He was already pawning
his clothing and working for a dial-a-dope gang to pay for it.

"We all want to be loved, we all feel affection for our families or
wish for it, we all have hopes for our lives, even those people you
see laying in the garbage," he said. "It is marginalizing these
people, pushing them further away from help and the embrace of society
that is the real problem. We are so lucky, so lucky, to have a
provincial government in this province that sees that and employs a
harm reduction model."