LOCK THEM UP UNTIL THEY'RE CLEAN

Addicts are not in a position to make decisions about their lives --
that's our duty

There is no logic here.

Those are the words of Vancouver police Const. Brenda Burridge,
talking about the Downtown Eastside, her beat for the past six years.

Those five words say it all.

Where is the logic in thousands of people taking drugs that turn
their lives into a miserable shuffle toward death?

Where is the logic in warehousing addicts in a neighbourhood where
drugs are sold on every block?

Where is the logic in letting these addicts suck tens of millions of
dollars a year out of our taxes and personal property while the
government does virtually nothing to treat their addictions?

Where is the logic in funding hundreds of social agencies whose
primary purpose is supporting people who are locked into drug dependency?

On a recent visit to the Downtown Eastside, I spent two hours walking
the beat with Burridge and Const. Claire Addey-Jibb, who spent a
great deal of time searching addicts who were huddled in doorways and
alleys, smoking and injecting crack and cocaine and shooting heroin.

"Pull your pants up, gather your things up and go back to your room,"
Burridge told one man after he scattered his tiny amount of cocaine
when caught preparing to inject it in a Blood Alley courtyard.

Here's some logic: Take these addicts and lock them up until they're clean.

Make them stop breaking into our cars, breaking into our homes. Make
them stop visiting the emergency room dozens of times a year. Make
them stop turning downtown Vancouver into a showcase of urban blight.

Make them become the people they could have been had they not become
drug addicts.

These people, in the grip of their addictions, cannot be responsible
for making decisions for themselves.

They need to be forced into long-term drug treatment.

There are those who say that if an addict doesn't want to quit,
rehabilitation will fail. But an addict who is busy feeding his
addiction is not the person to decide whether he should get drug
treatment. He needs to be locked up and detoxified, then put through
a rehabilitation program whether he likes it or not. Once he's out of
the grasp of the drugs, he'll be much more likely to see the benefits
of rehab and become a willing participant.

Many addicts, as well, have mental illnesses that make them even less
capable of making responsible decisions.

There are those who say we have no right to force people to get their
addictions treated, that doing so violates their civil rights.

Sorry. They lose their right to live as drug addicts when they start
using our tax money and stealing our property to pay for their
addicted lives. And we have a moral duty to step in and help people
unable to cope with their problems, an imperative we are presently
failing to achieve.

Lack of drug treatment stands as the primary reason for the social
catastrophe in the Downtown Eastside, says Al Arsenault, a former
Vancouver police officer who worked close to 15 years on Vancouver's
skid-row beat.

What Vancouver needs, says Arsenault, won't come cheap.

"The best treatment is the therapeutic-community model," says
Arsenault. "That's the solution. Anything else -- throwing boxes of
needles at somebody -- is not the answer. It just keeps people stuck
where they are."

While the best examples of the therapeutic-community approach are
found in Italy, where success rates top 70 per cent, the model can be
applied in B.C. on a scale to fit the need, Arsenault says.

Short-term treatment of 30 to 90 days functions merely as detox, he says.

Addicts in treatment need to be housed under constant supervision,
living under rules, sharing in chores and receiving training,
education and coaching to prepare for re-integration into society, he says.

"You've got to have long-term treatment," Arsenault says. "It's more
expensive [but] in the long term, it pays off."

Addiction-related costs from policing, the courts, health care,
imprisonment and theft are massive, and the loss of productivity adds
a huge social and economic cost, he says.

"The loss of human potential is staggering," says Arsenault, a strong
advocate for forced rehabilitation who has seen addicts lose limbs to
drug-related infections.

"We should say, 'Look, you're losing your arm. You're losing your
life. You've lost your job. You've lost your family. So I'm putting
you in treatment.'"

Understandably, many law-abiding, taxpaying citizens object to
proposals to spend hundreds of millions of dollars setting up and
running costly long-term treatment programs for junkies and crackheads.

But we're already spending almost a million dollars a day on the
Downtown Eastside, much of the money going to support addicted lives,
while doing little to end the problem. Non-profit social agencies
provide important damage control, and save many lives, but the
ultimate effect is to keep addicts warehoused in our ghetto, a black
hole that sucks in the vulnerable and wrecks their lives.

Without court-imposed long-term addiction treatment, we're going to
be spending that million dollars a day forever.

It would be far more cost-effective to invest in rehab programs and
facilities that would actually pull people out of that hellhole and
back into productive society.

It's easy to judge people who have chosen to destroy their own lives
and live off the rest of us. But for those, like Arsenault, who have
spent years getting to know the stories behind the addictions,
humanity overcomes condemnation.

"I don't judge people for being drug addicts," says Arsenault, a
driving force behind the Odd Squad educational films spotlighting
addicts in the Downtown Eastside. "I was never date-raped when I was
14. I didn't see my father blow his head off with his shotgun.

"There's some really nice people under the scabs and sores and dirt."

At the Welcome Home Society in Surrey, where addicts spend an average
of two years getting clean and preparing to become productive
citizens, costs run to about $65 a day per resident, or just under
$24,000 a year.

Data on success rates are not available because the facility has been
operating on a small scale for four years in preparation for an
expansion this summer, says director Len Jahn. But those who have
graduated so far have done well, Jahn says.

"They're not drains on society," Jahn says. "They're gainfully
employed. They're in good, healthy relationships."

To keep someone in a Canadian prison costs nearly three times what it
costs to treat an addict at Welcome Home, which is funded primarily
by former United Furniture Warehouse owner John Volken.

It's a safe bet that each untreated addict is costing us way more
than $24,000 a year in costs related to theft, health care, policing,
welfare, jails and the court system.

And each untreated addict represents not only a personal failure, but
the failure of our society to assist human beings who cannot help themselves.

Having judges lock them up to clean them up would save us a pile of
money, improve thousands of tortured lives and boost the economy.

There's logic in that.