DRUG POLICY DEBATED

Symposium aims to find solutions

Steve McDougall remembers well having to be literally "scraped off
the floor of a divy little apartment on Wark Street" before he could
get on the road to recovery from heroin addiction.

He considers himself lucky to have a caring family who were able to
help him stay on the road to recovery and place him in a long-term
detox facility, but said many people don't have that luxury. The
system in many instances, is failing them, he said.

"The state of treatment - even the state of availability of detox -
are pretty close to criminal," McDougall said. "The fact that someone
who wants to get clean has to wait three weeks to get a bed - so much
can happen in three weeks."

McDougall is a member of a new community coalition known as Voices of
Substance. He'll be among the panelists taking part in a day-long
symposium hosted this Friday entitled The Costs of Doing Nothing: Looking
Beyond our Current Approaches to Substance Use.

Guest speakers from the health care, police, business and sex trade
sectors will trade viewpoints with a selection of panelists from
equally varied groups to get a sense of the current state of
treatment and what direction could be taken to improve the situation.

A key point in staging the symposium, said McDougall, is that
standing still is not an option when it comes to helping substance
abusers in Greater Victoria get healthy.

"The whole thing about harm reduction is that you can't save a dead
addict. You can't offer them recovery," he said.

McDougall said from his perspective, having healthy choices available
for drug or alcohol addicted individuals is the key to healing. A
problem in past has been a "misdirection of resources," with not
enough emphasis on working with addicted individuals to find out
what they need.

"So much money would be saved by putting people through treatment
rather than putting them in jail," he said. "I don't think I would
have had a chance at recovery had I not been in a treatment place
that was longer than 28 days."

VOS member Connie Carter, a University of Victoria doctoral candidate
and former administrator for addictions research, said the goal of
the seminar is to spark dialogue in the community on various fronts.

Not only do the health care, academic and police communities need to
provide input on policy making, the people most likely to benefit
from any changes need to be involved as well.

"We can't develop social policy without input from the people who
will be affected by that social policy," she said. "I'm hoping we can
all come together and see each other's perspectives in a new light.
Education can change people."

The symposium runs from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Ambrosia Catering and
Events Centre, 638 Fisgard St. For more information, call 361-050 or
go to voicesofsubstance.ca.