CANADA'S OPIATE HISTORY ENDS ON SKID ROAD

TWO hundred years after opium gave birth to morphine, the misery and
squalor of addiction to opiates and other illicit drugs is gathering
momentum; aided and abetted by a host of self-accredited and
self-serving 21st century hedonists and amoral technocrats
advocating decriminalization.

Some history may explain our sorry state.

For more than 2,500 years the poppy, Papaver somniferum, has been
valued for its sap, which in its dried state is opium. A stimulant
narcotic poison, opium produces feelings of well being,
hallucinations and drowsiness, and for centuries was used in
countless medical potions as a cure for every real or imagined
ailment, without any understanding of its active ingredient.
Isolated in a soluble crystallized state in 1805, morphine was not
widely used until 1853 when introduction of the hypodermic syringe
enabled intravenous use. A quick fix bestowed powerful physiological
and psychic effects dwarfing those of opium. Continued use produced
overwhelming addiction; an overdose, the likelihood of death.

In hospitals and on battlefields, pain-killing morphine is a
God-given miracle. Non-medical indulgence, so-called recreational
use, is a dropout's cop-out.

In late-19th-century British society, morphine became a craze,
craved by many upper-class matrons. It was fashionable, lawful to
possess, offered nirvana at the price of addiction and guaranteed
tragedy. Whatever morphine did in transporting its users to a
world without pain, stress, time and mortality, opium's grandchild,
heroin, could do more but with greater addiction. Heroin offered
ultimate release from the straitjacket of reality without revealing
to the thrill-seeker or daredevil that very few intravenous users
ever escape life-threatening illness and disease that accompanies
compulsive uncontrolled use. The coincident discovery of cocaine, an
alkaloid of the coca plant, completed this tragic narcotic trilogy.

Notwithstanding the absurdity of fervent romancing by a few writers
and poets of divine insights and heightened intellect induced
through smoking or eating opium, by the end of the 19th century drug
addiction stood naked, offering only degradation, depravity and
disrepute; highlighted by many morphine-addicted high-society
matrons who victimized their families as they slid into suicidal
self-indulgence.

In the mid-19th century, to its everlasting dishonour, Britain
engaged in two wars against China to force a continuation of a
legalized opium trade - bringing about greater sales, ever-higher
levels of addiction, and leper-like suffering to chronic users.

Even so, at the dawning of the 20th century, Canadian society
remained impervious to the counter-culture of drug addiction - with
the exception of a few opium dens in Vancouver's Chinatown and the
lawful processing of raw opium in Vancouver and Victoria for
marketing in the eastern United States.

Our tranquility ended in 1907 when racist white citizens, angered
over a perceived flood of Chinese immigrants, rioted and destroyed
much of Chinatown. In the aftermath, Chinese property owners,
including two opium dealers, applied to Ottawa for compensation. The
federal official investigating the riot was a young Mackenzie King.
King was so concerned over the processing of opium in Canada that he
persuaded the federal government to legislate Canada's first
narcotic law, the Opium Act of 1908. In 1911, it became the Opium
and other Drugs Act. At roughly the same time Britain and the United
States criminalized possession and trafficking in opiates.

In the first 50 years of the 20th century the dynamics of Canadian
society were largely faith based - driven by moral and ethical
commitment to individual principles and standards. Ordinary citizens
understood the paramount importance of values in families and
communities and how these things translated into cherished
characteristics that gave rise to intense pride in saying "I am a
Canadian." And all of this was forged in the adversity of two world
wars and the Great Depression. We did not accept or encourage the
ultimate self-indulgence of addiction to illicit drugs.

In his Nov. 24, 2004, North Shore News column, Jerry Paradis wrote:
". . . we - citizens, police, judges - lived and worked within the
orthodoxy that all drugs are inherently evil (except, of course,
alcohol) and that prohibition and punishment can rid us of them . .
. it is distressing to consider the evils we spawned in our hopeless
attempt to impose criminal sanctions for private choices. . . .The
inclination in humans . . . to seek out mind-altering substances is innate."

A disposition, tendency, or propensity to use illicit drugs involves
thought processes that reject moral and ethical considerations. To
do the necessary preparation for intravenous injection; to search
out a suitable vein; to insert a hypodermic syringe and complete the
injection is an act of utmost selfishness and self-justification. It
is a chosen course of action that cannot be exculpated by labelling
it a private choice. It is inherently evil.

I believe that decent hardworking Canadians would reject any
government that ended criminalization of illicit drugs with a
technocracy of "private choices."

The 1952 Report on Criminal Offences in Canada cited 367 convictions
under the Opium and Narcotic Drugs Act - 254 of them recorded in
British Columbia, with 245 of the 254 occurring in Vancouver. The
Vancouver Police Department estimated that between 1,500 and 2,000
addicts were in British Columbia, nearly all of them in Vancouver.

On Dec. 5, 2004, Daphne Bramham reported in the Vancouver Sun: "The
Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse estimates there are 15,000
injection drug users in Vancouver. . . ." Skid Road Vancouver is
their mecca - a hellhole that addicts control and rule by force
and intimidation while they go about socializing, selling stolen
property, and trafficking in illicit drugs. Addicts are a menace to
residents and merchants of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside and Chinatown.

Since the 1960s, wave after wave of young people have been
confronted with an array of drugs beyond heroin and cocaine, a
smorgasbord with adult-pacifier marijuana at one end and
hallucinatory LSD at the other. More recently, the party drug
ecstasy, and addictive and dangerous amphetamines have been added
to the menu.

It seems indisputable that the dynamics of Canadian society changed
in the '60s: We adapted to greater individual liberty and a healthy
sub-culture of non-conformism, beset with a ride-along subset of
parasitical drug addicts; an increasingly elitist and condescending
judiciary constantly straying away from strictness and moral
uprightness in the imposition of punishment; a penitentiary system
philosophically opposed to making jail-time, hard time.

Too many people today fail to appreciate the vitally important
philosophical distinction between the concepts of freedom and
licence. The former requires self-discipline ingrained with a sense
of duty, whereas the latter translates into excessive liberty of
action guided by egocentric disregard for law and propriety.
Licentiousness is characterized by Edmund Burke's maxim "Intemperate
mankind can never be free; for by their appetites they forge their
fetters." Words that aptly describe drug addicts.

In place of criminalization we are being pressured to accept a
prescriptive regulatory system for the distribution of illicit
drugs; a tightly controlled technocracy touted by the Health
Officers Council of B.C., a registered society of "public health physicians."

If legalization ever becomes a reality you can bet your bottom
dollar it will blossom into full-blown bureaucratic absolutism
opening the floodgates to unlimited substitution therapy with
methadone and other synthetic narcotics, safe injection sites for
every disorderly congregation of addicts, endless prescription
trials of narcotics, and seamless epidemiological studies.

The resulting ideological maelstrom will require large numbers of
quasi-judicial officers, absolutist bureaucrats, topped off with
academics pressing on with every manner of abstruse conclusions in
attempting to prove addiction is a disease and that addicts are
victims of themselves. And all the while these virtuosi will be
spinning around in committees, conferences and public relations
without any sense of the urgency to bring about withdrawal and
abstinence by their essential laboratory addicts, dehumanized into
virtual lab rats.

I leave you with a glimpse into the point of view of British prison
doctor Anthony Daniels, who writes under the pen name of Theodore
Dalrymple. In his most recent book, Romancing Opiates -
Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, he writes:
"Contrary to our current pieties, therefore, which give those who
subscribe to them a comfortable warm glow of generosity of spirit,
but which are actually dehumanizing because they reduce addicts to
the status of mere physiological specimens or preparations in a
laboratory, addiction is a moral weakness par excellence."

In my next column I intend to challenge the ongoing de facto
solution to addiction being carried out by the Vancouver Coastal
Health Authority. And I'll give you more of Dr. Daniels coupled with
the opinions of a policeman who went beyond the call of duty in
working his entire career on the skids in Vancouver.