HARM REDUCTION ADVOCATES TARGET ADDICTS AND CRITICS

Supervised injection site epitomizes warped philosophy in Downtown
Eastside

In the year 2000, mayor Philip Owen introduced his Four Pillars drug
strategy aimed at widespread drug addiction in the Downtown Eastside.
The results have been disastrous. Addiction has flourished.

Homelessness has doubled. Blessed with official sanction, the drug
culture grows.

Owen left office in 2002, leaving behind a broken neighbourhood. Now a
"harm reduction" celebrity, he travels the world attending drug policy
conferences in the United States, Europe and Asia. And in 2008, he was
named to the Order of Canada, ending any speculation about that
institution's relationship with reality.

Meanwhile, back in the Downtown Eastside, a small band of true
believers took Owen's cue and mobilized forces--in plain view of a
pathetic media--to experiment on neighbourhood residents. In 2003,
Insite, the supervised injection site at 139 East Hastings, opened for
business. In 2005, at nearby 84 West Hastings, the NAOMI study staged
North America's first government-sponsored heroin giveaway. Sometime
soon at the same location, hundreds of addicts will receive up to
three daily doses of high-grade pharmaceutical heroin as part of the
four-year SALOME study.

But not everyone's on board.

"The best thing you can say about harm reduction advocates is that
they are reductionists--they are reducing a complex human problem to a
simple thing," said David Berner, the newly appointed executive
director of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada, an abstinence-based
organization (soon-to-be headquartered in Vancouver) founded by former
Conservative MP Randy White. "We need to get money and human energy
back into prevention, education and treatment."

Berner, a longtime broadcaster and writer, recently finished a book
about the X-Kalay Foundation Society, a residential treatment centre
for drug addicts and alcoholics he founded in 1967.

While the details are too varied for a single newspaper column, the
philosophical difference between harm reduction and abstinence-based
treatment is obvious. According to Berner, Insite organizers flirt
with the surreal when boasting about "directing addicts" into
treatment. "You cannot get involved with treatment with an addict who
just shot up," said Berner. "You can't talk to someone who just shot
up. So the claim they make, that they're getting people into
treatment, is absurd."

But criticizing Insite can come with a price. In the high stakes world
of harm reduction, where government grants provide vital lifeblood,
reputations are brutally defended. Critics targeted and bullied.

Just ask Colin Mangham.

Last September, the Portland Hotel Society, co-operators of Insite,
slapped a defamation and slander lawsuit on Mangham, a 60-year-old
research scientist and addictions expert whose 2007 RCMP-funded report
published in the Journal of Global Drug Policy and Practice questioned
the findings of Insite researchers. "Statements made about improving
public order, saving lives and getting people into detox are
misleading and based on data that just isn't there," said Mangham,
during a recent phone interview from his home in Langley. (To read the
report, google Mangham, Insite.)

Mangham, who owns a PhD in school and community health, spent his
career compiling and analyzing health and addiction data, as a private
contractor for governments and as a professor at Dalhousie University
in Halifax. His impressive resume apparently threatened Insite's holy
trinity of researchers--Thomas Kerr, Julio Montaner and Evan Wood who
are known worldwide as drug legalization advocates, a fact Mangham
wishes more people recognized.

"Yet they claim that they're objective scientists only interested in
the facts, and that I and the RCMP and the Harper government and
anybody who criticizes them are ideologues. That's hypocrisy," said
Mangham. "They are political activists."

Insite research is massaged, he adds, to prove predetermined outcomes.
The familiar defense, that Insite studies are peer reviewed, means
little to seasoned researchers like Mangham. "It's very common in
research, in fact it's problematic in every field, especially in
health and areas of human behaviour and addictions, that research is
published that isn't very strong," he said. "That fact is usually
mentioned during the second day of any statistics or methodology course."

The lawsuit remains in limbo, dependent on Insite's next move. It
weighs heavy on Mangham and has perhaps irreparably damaged his
professional reputation. "They have sought to affect my credibility
and that has hurt me financially," said Mangham, whose wife is
undergoing chemotherapy and is unable to work regularly. "We've built
up a huge line of credit that essentially may be insurmountable. I've
basically went a year without much income because of all this."

Ten years in, Vancouver's great harm reduction experiment keeps
rolling along, leaving rows of victims in its wake. Addicts get
sicker, critics assailed, while an entire neighbourhood rots from the
inside out.

Wonder if this is what Philip Owen had in mind?