HELP, DON'T SHUT OUT ADDICTS

Maybe it is time for some kind of "quiet revolution right in our
city," as suggested by city councillor and downtown business owner
Lorna Watkinson-Zimmer.

Maybe it is time for the downtown business owners to meet on the
streets, occupy the benches and keep the undesirables away from their
stores.

When dealers are selling drugs openly outside the doors of downtown
shops, when users are shooting up and smoking up in plain view of
customers -- as business owners say they see happen -- and police
admit there's not much to be done to stop this, some kind of
revolution is needed.

Who wants to shop or do business in that kind of environment?

When drug-related violence gets so commonplace that victims of random
beatings wonder if it's even useful to call the cops from the
emergency wards -- as is happening now --we've passed a point where
normal social behaviour patterns no longer apply.

Maybe we do need to take back the streets.

Well, we need to do something. Actually, we needed to do something a
long time ago.

What we needed a long time ago was a means of getting people out the
crazy clutches of the drug world. What we needed a long time ago was a
drug rehab unit, something Watkinson-Zimmer wanted no part of in the
downtown area, where drug crime seems to be worst.

Understandably upset, business owners are trying on their own to clean
up the place where they earn their livings. Maybe they could also
remind each other that a little co-operation a long time ago would
have had part of the solution up and running in Red Deer by now.

In fact, spending a little more time on the streets may just be a
beginning of a new understanding.

How about spending an entire day outside on street benches, not
welcome anywhere in the city, just whiling away the hours until the
shelters open for the night?

On a Tuesday, you can find acceptance and a hot meal at Potter's Hand
downtown. Supper is served, beginning at 4:30 p.m. Nobody questions if
you are drunk or stoned -- the only rules are that you remain civil to
others and that you not carry your food outside with you. Nobody gets
rehabilitated, but if you're hungry, you get fed.

A lot of the drop-in visitors at Potter's Hand or People's Place would
love to get off the drugs that make them do all kinds of really stupid
stuff. They've been waiting a long time for the support they need to
clean themselves up and be respectable members of society again, the
kind of people welcomed at the stores downtown.

Actually spending a day or two on the streets, even sober, would be a
good lesson that the streets are just as scary for the addicts as they
are for everyone else.

A very few people, for reasons only they can understand, choose their
life on the streets.

A few more delude themselves that they can survive in the world of
drugs.

Most want out, but many don't have the courage or resources to travel
to Edmonton or Calgary, where detox and rehab programs exist. So they
live where they are and they do whatever the drugs tell them to do, to
get through the days.

There's nothing to excuse drug addictions and their evil twin
children, crime and violence. You enter their universe and even if you
do manage to get out, it shortens your life.

But if people just put up walls to a problem, people in trouble can't
get out. You need doors. Also, you can't put the doors where you want
them to be (someplace else); you have to put them where they need to
be.

A detox centre -- when we finally get one -- won't be the whole answer
to the crazy drug-related crime that scares us so much, any more than
keeping the undesirables away from us will.

If we're asking for a revolution here, we have to ask for a total
commitment to it.