RED DEER NEEDS DETOX CENTRE

It's been a long war. How many years has it been now since Canada and
the United States formally declared the war on drugs?

Longer than most of today's addicts have been alive.

The original battle plan - tough enforcement - is still in place. We
still spend huge resources on chasing criminals and infiltrating the
criminal groups that make up the original suppliers. In fact, we're
barely impressed anymore with reports of massive drug busts. And we
still support strong penalties in the courts for high-level drug dealers.

But lately we've opened two new fronts in the drug war and we're
starting to see progress in what once looked like a war we could never
win.

One front is education. Increased knowledge about how dangerous - and
how terribly addictive - the new chemicals are has begun to seep
through every stratum of our society.

Drug use is no longer an "other people's" problem. It's everyone's.
It's not just the potheads, junkies, dopers and druggies that we used
to stigmatize as the "problem" group of drug users anymore.

Police know, and so do we, that business owners, white collar workers,
professional athletes, doctors, lawyers and honours students are
customers of drug peddlers, not just the down-and-out.

We also realize that these customers quickly join the ranks of those
in the commonly regarded demographic we associate with the "drug problem."

Therefore, there's a lot more support among taxpayers, for instance,
for police efforts to make access to drugs as difficult as possible.
We celebrate when drug enforcement crime stats go up, as awkward as
that may sound.

It means there is less junk on the streets, and that pushers know
they're being watched and will not be tolerated.

The education front on this war also helps us celebrate another
awkward statistic. In the last six months, there have been more than
100 drug overdoses recorded at Vancouver's supervised safe injection
site.

That's a reason to celebrate? Yes it is, because that's 100 lives
saved. Each and every overdose was caught quickly and safely treated.
So that's 100 - and probably more - people in Vancouver who weren't
found dead on the street in the morning.

Education about what drug addiction really is helps us realize this
and also help us accept the second new front that is bringing us some
new victories in the war on drugs. That new front is harm reduction
and treatment.

In the David Thompson Health Region, the indicators for addiction are
higher than the provincial average for almost any category you care to
name: sexual assault, injury/ fatality collisions, cannabis offences,
drug-related hospital separations, alcohol-related hospital
separations, alcohol-related liver disease, impaired driving and
liquor violations.

In Red Deer, we celebrate the crime stats and the arrest records of
the police because we link them to decreases we've seen in break-ins,
robberies, auto thefts and violence that we have associated with the
drug trade.

Perfectly reasonable, but we should also create a link in this sort of
crime to the opening of a methadone treatment centre in Red Deer.
People taking a supervised, free methadone program are people who have
realized what a dead end their addictions are. Taking methadone helps
an addict feel "normal" for the day, hold a job, build some savings
and get off the street.

This is a population highly motivated to get off drugs.

If we are serious about fighting drugs, we need to make it more
difficult to access drugs, but we also need to make it easier to get
off them.

And while people are fighting their demons in the drug world, we need
to keep them as safe as we can so we can get them out of it alive.

That's what Red Deer's needle exchange program is for.

We've probably saved a few lives already with the programs that Red
Deer has. We know we've saved an awful lot of money on reduced crime,
thefts and insurance claims.

We've also saved a lot of health care money, if we can prevent the
spread of diseases that travel through the use of shared needles.
Next, we need to support a place where people can detoxify to the
point where they can think rationally about their own drug addictions.

If the proposed site downtown Red Deer is so imperfect that we simply
can't accept it - which is not yet proven - then we need to find an
alternative site quickly for a detox centre.

And it isn't just the job of some committee somewhere else to find
it.

If you know of a place that could serve the purposes of a safe
sleeping place for homeless intoxicated people and a supervised detox
centre, you should bring it forward.

Otherwise, the default site will likely be the one already
proposed.

It's been a long war. Sad, hard and expensive. But we have no
alternative but to carry it on - on all fronts.