PAIR TO BE HONOURED FOR WORK ON DRUG TREATMENTS

Donald Macpherson, Dr. Martin Schechter Will Receive Awards Friday at
Conference in New Mexico

Donald MacPherson was behind the scenes for many years, helping steer
Vancouver's Four Pillars Drug Strategy, but Friday he takes centre
stage when he receives an award for his efforts at the International
Drug Policy Reform Conference in Albuquerque, N.M.

MacPherson work for 12 years as the city's drug policy coordinator
until stepping down last month. He developed and implemented
Vancouver's drug policy strategy starting in 2000, with the pillars
of prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement.

"Vancouver is on the cutting edge of drug policy reforms. Donald is
being recognized for playing a pivotal role in terms of Vancouver's
leadership worldwide," said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of
the Drug Policy Alliance, a U.S.-based organization that advocates
for alternatives to that country's "War on Drugs" campaign.

Nadelmann says Vancouver's "European common sensibility thinking"
approach addresses drug use and addiction as a health issue rather
than a criminal matter.

He credited MacPherson for helping create the city's prescribed
heroin maintenance treatment program and for North America's first
and only supervised injection site, which opened in 2003.

Under MacPherson's leadership, Vancouver also launched a program in
2005 comparing the effectiveness of prescribed heroin and methadone
maintenance treatments, and worked to expand addiction services
throughout Vancouver. These reforms resulted in a dramatic drop in
the number of overdose deaths in Vancouver and in the transmission of
disease among IV drug users, Nadelmann said.

MacPherson was in France and could not be reached for an interview.
However, he said in a news release that people who use drugs should
not be criminalized, especially those who develop addictions and/or
have mental health problems.

"Much of what plays out on the streets of Vancouver -- the selling,
the using, the killing, the infections, the dying and the property
crime -- is a direct result of the criminalization of drugs," he said.

Another Vancouver resident, Dr. Martin Schechter, the national
director of the Canadian HIV Trials Network, will also receive an
award at the conference. Schechter will receive the Norman E. Zinberg
Award for achievement in the field of medicine for his work on a
unique clinical trial investigating the benefits of
medication-assisted therapy for people suffering from chronic opiate
addictions who have not benefited from other treatments. He was the
principal investigator for the NAOMI Project (North American Opiate
Medication Initiative), a three-year-long clinical trial.

Schechter is a professor in the department of health care and
epidemiology at the University of B.C. and the chairman of the UBC
division of epidemiology and biostatistics

The International Drug Policy Reform Conference will bring together
nearly 1,000 leading international experts, treatment providers,
researchers, policy-makers and key activists at the leading global
forum on drug policy reform.

In 2003, then-Vancouver mayor Larry Campbell and former mayor Philip
Owen, along with Quebec Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, shared the same
award MacPherson will be receiving, called the Richard J. Dennis
Drugpeace Award for outstanding achievement in the field of drug
policy. At that time, it was the first time in the history of the
award that it had been given to Canadians.