HARM REDUCTION IS CUNNING NONSENSE

PROPONENTS of the ideology of harm reduction -- with their strident
claims that reducing harm will bring drug addiction and related crime
under control -- are nothing more than self-serving
propagandists.

A mantra-like repetitive misuse of the words "harm reduction" is
intended to make truth out of their illusion that addiction is a
manageable illness; a fool's paradise conjured up by Vancouver's
health department and the Vancouver Coastal Health authority. It is
cunning nonsense.

The use of the positive label harm reduction is a sly attempt to
insinuate merit and worth into unmanageable needle exchanges, unsafe
injection sites and open-ended drug maintenance using methadone.

Wily harm-reduction activists are in a bureaucratic heaven as they
glean data from a steady stream of addicts; the data ending up in
career building ivory-tower research and evaluation. Whether our
pitiful research specimens, human beings, avoid overdosing; or
overdose and die -- and sometimes be brought back to life only to
continue to use drugs -- is grist for this grisly statistics mill.

To merely change the setting in which a poison is absorbed or to
substitute a synthetic poison in its place is medically wrong. It is a
misadventure of the most perilous kind. Canadian society has to
confront the falsehood of harm reduction and all that accrues from
it.

A decent and humane society must have significant influence on the
self-indulgent few who engage in chronic ingestion of illicit drugs
and crime. Law-abiding Canadians must speak forcefully on the issue of
illicit drugs. The welfare of our children and grandchildren is at
stake.

English writer Victor S. Pritchett said, "When I say society I mean
more than people; I mean people bound together for an end."

Whatever our ends may be on the issue of illicit drugs, they must
never be a deceitful bill of goods pressed on us by Orwellian
health-bureaucrats and their spin doctors.

In my opinion this two-decade-long deviant process has now breached
the thin blue line. We have reached the point of de facto
legalization. We witness now a joyless parade of messed-up people
stumbling into the Skids of the Downtown Eastside. Once there they
engage in vandalism and property crime and avoidance of abstention.
They are deservedly ostracized and must be dealt with as the criminals
they are.

Harm reduction, once an adjunct process to abstention, now enables
drug use and only chatters on about withdrawal and habitual abstinence.

When an addict says, "To hell with the straight life, I'm
copping-out," he has to be told: "No! We won't let you, we'll put you
through detox right now and we'll help you through withdrawal and
recovery." Consider the truth of what Dickens said less than two
centuries ago: "Society is where men have to live, like it or not, no
one escapes."

To paraphrase Dickens: What an addict rejects is not humanity or human life
in general, but social life in particular.

Think it through, folks. With harm reduction being pressed on us as
the principal way to counteract addiction, trafficking and related
property crime, the end result will be drug legalization. The
unintended consequence with legalization will surely be an
anything-goes upside-down society and bleak prospects for our
vulnerable children and grandchildren targeted by black market drug
gangs.

There are many leaders amongst us who will not cave in to the harm
reduction crowd. One is recently retired Vancouver policeman Al
Arsenault. He and his partners in Odd Squad Productions Society have
worked countless off-duty hours to film and document the truth about
Vancouver's deeply rooted drug world.

On Nov. 2, the New York Independent International Film and Video Festival
awarded Odd Squad's Stolen Lives the Founder's Choice for a Documentary.
Their film Tears for April: Beyond the Blue Lens was awarded Excellence in
Cinema for a Feature Film.

I've seen both films and was stunned by the destructive consequences
of the chronic ingestion of illicit drugs, a reality far beyond any
worst-case scenario I had in mind.

On Oct 27, after receiving word from the New York festival, Arsenault was
ecstatic: "Here's some good news about our follow-up film to Through a Blue
Lens. Tears for April: Beyond the Blue Lens represents 10 years of filming
distilled into a 98-minute masterpiece. We are showing it at Cinemark's
Tinseltown Cinema from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, two matinees and two evening shows
a day. Come and see the film that the Vancouver International Film Festival
cared not to screen."

While Arsenault was in New York receiving acclaim for Tears for April,
Vancouver was being examined by American newsman Dan Rather.

In a Vancouver Sun report on Nov. 2, headlined Dan Rather Here to Show
Ugly Side of Vancouver, columnist Miro Cernetig reported that when
Rather sat down with Mayor Sam Sullivan Thursday, the newsman asked
whether the world would see the 'Dickensian' underbelly of Vancouver
in 2010.

Cernetig said Rather zeroed in on the mayor's drug policy and the
Insite project and asked if the mayor was "mollycoddling" drug users,
prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells in the Downtown Eastside?

According to Cernetig the mayor was also asked if Insite is tantamount
to "state assisted suicide."

The jig is up, Mayor Sullivan: Humpty-Dumpy Vancouver is about to fall off
the harm-reduction wall; and when it does, all your spin doctors and medical
health officers will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again.