MAYOR'S DRUG TASK FORCE PRESSING AHEAD

The Mayor's Task Force on Harm Reduction and Community Safety took a small
but significant step forward Wednesday with the formation of a steering
committee charged with keeping the whole process moving along.

Forum organizer Daryle Roberts of the AIDS Resource Centre said the meeting
saw more than 70 participants split into groups based on the so-called Four
Pillar approach of prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction to
deal with drug use and abuse within the Central Okanagan.

"We provided them with a definition of what the four pillars mean," he
said. "They discussed that and from there picked two or more people from
each pillar to sit on the steering committee."

One immediate result of the meeting will be the organization soon of
smaller community forums with the aim of defining the problem and gleaning
recommendations at the neighbourhood level, Roberts added.

"This affects them directly," he said. "We need to know what's going on in
their communities and what they feel the solutions will be."

The need for local research into the scope of drug use in the Central
Okanagan was also recommended.

Roberts said the steering committee was anxious to meeting again soon and
will likely do so by the end of January.

The Mayor's Task Force on Community Safety and Harm Reduction began last
fall amid concerns that drug abuse in the downtown core was increasing and
becoming more blatant.

The task force has adopted as a template the Four Pillars approach which
has been adopted by Vancouver to deal with its burgeoning street drug problem.