I FEAR FOR B.C.'S FUTURE

LAST night I had a nightmare about British Columbia in 2020.

A demented British Columbia was fast becoming Canada's land of the
behaviourally disordered; a promised land of 24-hour Insites and
surreal achievements viewed through the looking glass of never-ending
"recreational" drug use; a land bereft of insight, common sense and
ethics.

I am jolted awake and it dawns on me that British Columbia already is
the de facto drug capital of Canada, with pre-eminence over all other
provinces in a madcap move towards drug legalization.

What drug legalizers don't even dare think about, and what we surely
will have to endure, is the inevitability of Orwellian bureaucrats and
their medicine men, pitted against international traffickers and their
contrivances and deceit. Our young people will be trapped between them.

In 2000, then-mayor Phillip Owen sold Vancouverites a bill of goods
that would make a Howe Street promoter blush.

Like a biblical prophet he gave us the word. Our western land was to
rise up on the certainty of the "four pillars."

On Nov. 21, 2000, the Vancouver Sun made it a front page story
headlined This Is an International Crisis.

Wrong. Vancouver was already an international disgrace.

The Sun story, by reporter Frances Bula, said that "Mayor Philip Owen
unveils today his sweeping plan for the city's drug crisis.

"Safe-injection sites for drug users and providing free heroin for
hard-core addicts on a trial basis are among the strategies the City
of Vancouver is recommending in a new drug policy that is the first of
its kind in North America.

"The plan, to be made public today, also includes drug courts that
would put users into treatment instead of jail, special treatment beds
for young people, day centres for drug users outside the Downtown
Eastside, testing of street drugs to help prevent overdoses, and more
police to target upper-level drug dealers. . . .

"The new plan, a copy of which was obtained by the Vancouver Sun,
contains 24 recommendations . . . intended to emphasize the . . .
strategy used in some European cities that is known as the four-pillar
approach.

"Like European cities that pioneered it, Vancouver is also taking the
position that it has to act even if others are not willing to yet.
And, like them, it is also clearly shifting to a position that says
drug addiction is a health issue, not a criminal issue.

"The plan does not commit the city to spending any money or to
undertaking any immediate, controversial action. . . . All but two of
the recommendations are labelled as the responsibility of . . . the
federal and provincial governments, the Vancouver health board and the
Vancouver Police Department. . . .

"Owen says that, while public reaction is important, the city will not
agree to a final strategy that doesn't have all four pillars in place."

On Nov. 16, 2002, Larry Campbell succeeded Owen in office and got
there by being a loud voice in a campaign for so-called safe-injection
sites.

Owen, Campbell and incumbent mayor Sam Sullivan are still campaigning
for this cosmetic solution to Vancouver's festering sore of Skid Road.

Seven years have come and gone and all we have is rhetoric and one
legal shooting gallery.

In the meantime we have lowered ourselves even deeper into the
quagmire with a cheaper and more fashionable poison, excuse me, er
drug, made locally: crystal methamphetamine.

On Sept. 18, Owen popped up again on the op-ed page of the Sun under
the headline Continuing the 'War on Drugs' Is not Helping the Addicted.

Of all people, Owen should know by now that Canada has never had a war
on drugs; the only war is that of the international traffickers in
opiates who target the United States and local marijuana grow
operators who, unidentifiable, slither unseen among us.

Similarly loose with facts, Owen fantasized that "Those who are
addicted . . . did not choose a life of addiction, illness, crime and
eventual early death. They are the victims and they require medical
assistance.

"In 2001, Vancouver . . . adopted a four pillars approach --
prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction. This approach
does not have the 100-year record of the war on drugs, but Vancouver
has five years of experience in implementing it.

". . . we opened a supervised injection site in downtown Vancouver in
2003. The most recent study of the effects of this site shows that it
reduces public disorder, refers users to addiction counselling, saves
lives and improves health because it significantly reduces needle sharing."

Owen is in reverie and divorced from reality.

The hard truth is that Vancouver has opened one unsafe injection site
and the other pillars are imaginary; and that includes enforcement of
the existing federal criminal law.

Only a massive involvement by the federal government will rid
Vancouver of the pestilence of illicit drug abuse.

When one becomes addicted, and a criminal, he no longer satisfies the
criteria for citizenship -- "a member of society especially as regards
one's contribution to it."

Citizenship does not include a so-called God-given right to knowingly
become addicted to a poison and then claim victimization.

Society is an association of persons united in a common moral and
ethical aim, supported by firm laws. That aim does not include
druggies and traffickers.

Our once proud Canadian society is constantly being brainwashed to
accept never-ending addiction as a normal feature.

We are being deluded into living according to a lowest common
denominator.

It's time to be as tough as nails and stand together against these
misfits.