PUNISHING THE PAIN OF OTHERS

I celebrate the Supreme Court of Canada's 9-0 ruling that Vancouver's
supervised drug injection site -- the only one in North America -- can
stay open despite the Harper government's prolonged, almost vicious,
attempts to close it.

"Vicious" is a strong word but at some point the decision to ignore
human pain on the grounds of mere ideology becomes a decision to
inflict gratuitous pain. As a matter of policy in many tracts of human
life, the Conservatives believe there isn't enough punishment to go
around. In some cases they're right. We don't harm pedophiles nearly
enough, for instance, or tax the hedge funders who helped dig our
current financial sinkhole.

But we let, for example, native Canadians be slapped, slammed, shunned
and shamed often from birth. And then we wonder why, among others,
they wander Vancouver's Downtown Eastside trying to take a brain
vacation from the pain, often through a needle.

I'd do it. The reason I don't is that I wasn't hurt enough in
childhood. They were, I wasn't, lucky old me.

You don't have to spend time with them. The literature is there. The
great Dr. Gabor Mate, who has worked in the area for many long years,
wrote a classic book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, about the nature
and source of his patients' addictions. They exude unsavory fluids, he
writes: blood from cuts and blows, ooze from chronic wounds or from
the pits they dig into their skin out of compulsion.

You wouldn't like that, but then in the middle class, we keep the
emblematic pain fluids internal, or tidy like tears. "The reason I do
drugs is so I don't feel the fucking feelings I feel when I don't do
drugs," Nick, a 40-year-old heroin and crystal meth addict, once told
Mate. It makes sense to me.

I began the column with the personal words "I celebrate" because I
have for years now looked with wonderment at how tolerant we are of
middle-class alcoholics and how brutal we are to the sex trade workers
and the destitute who choose other drugs. Alcohol is an awful drug and
it costs billions to shore up the collapsing health of its users.

I see an alcoholic every day in a nearby bar, turning up like
clockwork. He nurses a pale yellow fluid in a glass. It looks like
urine. He takes great care not to look desperate as he controls his
sips. His medical care requires yearly hospitalizations. He is in dire
straits.

I know that. I'd like to see him reduce the harm he is doing to
himself, family and country, but my help would not be welcome.

He votes Conservative. He despises "rubbies" and winos. He's not like
them.

The British novelist Edward St. Aubyn has written about his heroin
use, the result of being sodomized by a brutal father when he was a
tiny boy. You don't recover from that level of self-loathing. "Alcohol
is such a crude high," he recalls his first drug dealer telling him.

So he shoots up, the kind of user who can't remove his overcoat at
airports because they don't let you into the country when your arm
skin looks like red rubble. Besides, he's too emotionally fragile. "Do
you ask a lobster to disrobe?"

What I see is not even a continuum between the little native girl Mate
described whose stepfather stood over her in bed and ritually spit on
her, and the middle-class drinker who can no longer digest food, and
St. Aubyn whose every footstep was "on ground that undulated softly,
like a swallowing throat."

These three types of sufferers are the same, people doing themselves
harm because even a different harm is an improvement on the regular
harm.

All I'm offering here is a window into why people inject drugs, to
ease the rasp of life on the nerves. I thank the Supreme Court for
sorting out the distinction between what governments want -- and are
allowed -- to inflict on them.