A JUNKIE'S LIFE IS NOT OK

LET there be no mistake about the peril a neglected skid road in Vancouver
poses to the 2010 Winter Games.

I predict that in five years the Vancouver area will be infested with at
least 20,000 hopeless junkies.

Their narcotic headquarters - the skids - will be operating 24-7, only a
kilometer away from the Olympic village.

For years the skid road narcotic epidemic has supported a cottage industry
of research, inquiries and proposals. Newspapers have poked at it with
editorials and sometimes alarmist headlines.

On November 21, 2000, the Vancouver Sun proclaimed, This is an
International Crisis, Mayor Philip Owen Unveils Today his Sweeping Plan for
City's Drug Crisis.

Owen called for an equal effort in prevention, treatment, law-enforcement
and harm reduction.

It was all flim-flam.

It boiled down to a campaign for a so-called safe injection site.

In 2002, Owen did not run for mayor again and his successor and acolyte
Larry Campbell bounded into office - an even louder voice for injection
sites, crack cocaine smoking rooms and free heroin for hard core users.

Campbell opened North America's first legal shooting gallery in September 2003.

It aids and abets criminals in their possession and use of narcotics.

Now Campbell and his cohort of appeasers of hard-core addicts claim that
lives are being saved, the spread of HIV is being inhibited and addicts are
being referred to professionals for rehabilitation. Really?

What nonsense.

At the moment of injection, no junkie is able to commit to withdrawal and
abstinence.

But I have no doubt that heroin addicts are being encouraged to switch to
methadone, a synthetic opiate-like painkiller that acts slowly and without
the rush of heroin.

It can be more addictive and difficult to withdraw from than heroin.

In the mid-1960s methadone was heralded as a cure for heroin addiction.

It failed.

It transformed a heroin addict into a methadone addict - still an unstable
criminal.

But the methadone cure won't go away.

Under the guidance of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, the College
of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia administers a so-called
methadone maintenance treatment.

At present, more than 500 doctors throughout the province are authorized to
prescribe methadone for narcotic addicts.

Addicts are designated as patients.

In this doctor-patient relationship, a degenerate and self-indulgent
criminal is de-stigmatized into a victim of an illness.

In the last 10 years there has been an ominous three-fold increase to more
than 8,000 heroin addicts on methadone.

I wonder if doctors are actually treating symptoms or just postponing what
they would call a cure, the only real cure for drug addiction and that is
detoxification and abstention.

Is there a real doctor-patient relationship here?

And while the safe injection site, methadone and free syringes have
simplified and condoned drug abuse by heroin and cocaine addicts, a new
epidemic of a more poisonous and addictive substance - crystal
methamphetamine - is starting to devour our latest generation of addicts.

An unfettered skid road, with its enabling and ennobling of addiction, is
an affront to every citizen and to the Canadian way of life.

We are a people who feel deeply about our prevailing social order and ought
to fight to preserve it.

I adopt the words of England's V. S. Pritchett: "When I say 'society' I
mean more than people; I mean people bound together for an end."

The end we seek is individual liberty in a community constrained by law and
order, and our own sense of self-restraint and duty to others.

We abide by the law and expect our leaders, elected and appointed, to
maintain only what is right.

It is wrong to scoff at society by engaging in uncontrolled use of
prohibited drugs.

A habitual drug addict is a criminal and society is his or her victim.

Addicts ought to be stigmatized for what they are: citizens who have gone
beyond the pale - junkies.

And if their compulsion drives them to commit violence and serial property
crime then jail and mandated detoxification is a just consequence.

Addiction is not an illness; it is a compulsion.

Only abstinence will terminate addiction.

Vancouver's treadmill of safe injection, methadone and experimentation in a
free heroin study is a de facto legalization of narcotics.

Concern is for the junkie - not the junkie's victim and our way of life.

Skid road is now an experiment in appeasement of narcotic addicts justified
in seemingly plausible terms that are actually fallacious and irresponsible.

We need more police and zero tolerance on skid road.

We desperately need more detoxification facilities.

We must fast track the construction of more short and long-term residential
treatment centres.

We need more counsellors.

And all of this we need now.

Wake up Mr. and Mrs. North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Burnaby and Richmond.

If we lose the fight for a return to law, order and social peace in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside then, as has already begun in New Westminster
and north Surrey, be prepared for a taste of skid road in your own
neighbourhoods.