LET'S TREAT THE CAUSE OF GANG VIOLENCE -- DRUGS

If the judge had put Brianna Kinnear in jail when she came into court
just after Christmas, she'd probably still be alive.

Instead, she was swallowed in the maelstrom of Lower Mainland drug
violence this week.

Five weeks after Kinnear was released without a jail sentence for drug
offences, she was shot to death at the wheel of a pickup in Coquitlam.
She was barely out of her teens. She'd been running with a rough crowd.

After police arrested her in February 2007 in Port Moody, she was
charged, along with two others, with possessing cocaine, crystal meth,
the opiate painkiller oxycodone and marijuana -- all for trafficking
purposes.

Ten months after that arrest, the man charged along with her, Jesse
John Margison, was shot several times in a Coquitlam townhouse. He
survived, but another man, Jonathan William McMillan, was found dead
outside the townhouse complex. James Craig MacIsaac is awaiting trial
in Margison's shooting. Margison, who is "well known" to Coquitlam
RCMP, according to Cpl. Brenda Gresiuk, is in jail on another matter.

The woman charged along with Kinnear in the drug offences, Tiffany Ann
Bryan, is on the Coquitlam RCMP's "prolific-offenders" list, and has
been since 2007. She's one of the top 50 repeat offenders in that
detachment's jurisdiction, Gresiuk says.

Kinnear was convicted of possessing cocaine, pot and oxycodone for
trafficking purposes. On Dec. 29, a judge handed her a conditional
sentence, fined her $100 and sent her on her way.

On Tuesday, Coquitlam RCMP received a call around 7 p.m. about a
suspicious pickup parked on Oxford Street just south of Mason Avenue.
The driver's side window of the black pickup was smashed, and Kinnear
was slumped over the wheel, dead. RCMP say she was 21. Court records
indicate she was 22.

The regional Integrated Homicide Investigation Team believes the
killing of Kinnear was unrelated to the fatal shooting that same
evening of Raphael Baldini, 21, in Surrey and the gunfire death the
day before of James Ward Erickson, 25, also in Surrey. "It's no
different had they happened three months apart," says IHIT spokesman
Cpl. Dale Carr. "There's nothing to suggest . . . that this is the
result of a gang war."

More to the point is the fact that the surging violence in recent
weeks is driven by the drug trade. From the street drug bazaar in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, to the crackhouses of Surrey, to the
gang shootings in the Fraser Valley, the drug problem is ripping our
communities apart.

You'd think that with shooting in the boulevards that threatens the
innocent, and the hundreds of millions of dollars spent dealing with
addicts, our elected leaders would call for a focused, high-profile
program to combat the violence where it starts: drugs. Instead, we get
politicians, academics and pundits blaming the police for not doing
enough, and calling for a crackdown on gangsters, as was demanded by
NDP public-safety critic Mike Farnworth yesterday, when he attacked
bail releases for gang members.

Gangs are a symptom. Drugs are the cause. Let's treat the cause.