CITY HALL PUSHES HARM INTENSIFICATION

Re: McTreatment won't meet needs of addicts, Sound-off, May 30

Cheryl Savchenko has hit the nail, if not City Hall, on the head.

Thirty years ago it was generally thought that substandard housing
was the markets' response to substandard incomes. Today, such housing
is the market's response to an exponentially increasing number of
addicts in a society that has closed down the institutions that
provided medical services to people with serious mental health issues.

City Hall is planning to open its own franchise of addiction squats
throughout Vancouver. The next one will be built at 16th and Dunbar,
modelled on the prototype foisted on enraged residents on Fraser
Street. There is no science or effective therapy behind these places.

In the bureaucratic newspeak of City Hall reports, these places are
said to provide "addiction program services" (meaning they have a
desk clerk) in an "abstinence-based environment" (meaning they shoot
up off-site where the kids play in the park). There cannot be
effective services in a neighbourhood squat setting.

The city has thus embarked on a program of harm intensification. If
allowed to continue, this policy will some day be seen as the most
inept social planning decision any government has ever made. Addicts
support their addiction by crime. The odds favour recidivism. As Mark
Twain said of smoking, "I can give it up anytime I want. I have done
it a thousand times."

To establish government-run addict hotels throughout the city in
residential neighbourhoods is like treating cancer by causing it to
metastasize.

Jonathan Baker

Vancouver