HOW TO FIX CRACK-HOUSE CONUNDRUM

As you know from previous columns, there are a handful of crack
houses in Parkdale, and maybe there are one or two in your
neighbourhood as well.

What to do?

The answers are not as obvious or as immediate as you might think.
Here's what I think:

The first thing, let's license all the landlords. Because this is how
easy it is to turn an apartment building or a rooming house into a
hellhole:

If you're a dealer, find somebody living on a two-bit pension in a
part of town where you want to do business, and offer him a hundred
bucks a week for the use of his room during the day. Bingo -- all of
a sudden you have a base from which to deal.

After all, a hundred bucks a week is peanuts to a pusher, but it is
hard to turn down 20 per cent of your monthly income, tax free, no
questions asked, if you are on assistance of some kind.

This is a particularly easy deal to make with someone who is weak or
easily intimidated.

Once a dealer moves in, here comes a long line of the hard, the
desperate, the weak and the miserable, and there goes the building.

But too many landlords -- the guy who owns the crack house on Wilson
Park Rd. is a prime example -- don't give a damn about what goes on,
and they don't support their superintendents -- if they even have
supers -- as long as the rent money keeps flowing.

But if landlords were licensed ... well, either you get this picture
or you don't.

The second thing, let's give the cops useful tools. Not the ones you
might think.

If enforcement was an answer to the drug problem, our streets would
have been swept clean long ago, because we have pretty good
enforcement here.

Alas, when the cops sweep up, the drug mess simply moves -- from
Seaton St. to Bloor and Lansdowne, and from there to Parkdale, and
then over to Etobicoke.

And back again.

There is another problem, particularly vexing, with successful
enforcement: when a drug bust nets a major haul, the law of supply
and demand kicks in -- drug prices rise, and the dealers get even
richer.

And then there is the problem within the problem: when pot is hard to
find, certain dealers offer crack at introductory rates -- try this,
it will get you higher faster, it's cheap, the first hit's on me.

As for the little fish in this festering pond, jail is no deterrent.
Arrests only work if there is help and encouragement for users. We do
have a superlative drug treatment court in Toronto, where addicts are
offered a chance to dry up and clean up in lieu of jail.

But we need to expand the program.

At the moment, there are precious few treatment beds in Toronto. Use
your rational mind: what's the better solution -- building more and
bigger jails, or helping people quit?

Here's another part of the solution: Harm reduction.

For serious addicts, there is a limited range of outcomes. Death is
one. Long-term disease is another. Dead people offer us nothing. And
addicts who pick up serious diseases before they quit require major
lifelong health care.

And so harm reduction is in our interests socially. But it is also in
our interests financially, which ought to be enough to make
conservatives hold their noses and support harm reduction.

One final thing.

There is a municipal election on the horizon. Ask candidates in your
ward where they stand on the licensing of landlords, on drug
treatment programs, and on harm reduction.