MAYOR LEADS WAY ON ADDICT CARE REFORM

To the editor:

Mayor Walter Gray, former Vancouver Mayor Philip Owen and Capital News
columnist John McDonald are truly ardent champions of civic
responsibility. Thanks to the determination of Gray and Owen and a
voice as urgently insistent as McDonald's, some movement is finally
afoot toward confronting a drug-abuse virus that, given any more
neglect, could strangle not only Kelowna but all of urban Canada.

While unspoken, that really was the message derived from adding up all
the concerns raised by speakers and audience members at the Nov. 26
Mayor's Forum on Community Safety and Harm Reduction. That's hardly
exaggerated, since there have been a spate of media reports and
authoritative books recently spelling out how the illegal
drug-marketing kingpins of organized crime and biker gangs have
virtually expanded beyond the law's reach and, most regrettably,
compounded the increasing urban crime wave fuelled mostly by their
illegal products.

So, these predators are plundering taxpayer vaults by not only
escaping tax-free, as keynote speaker Owen indicated at the
forum-although not with the same words as mine-but are escalating
public costs and depleting governmental coffers of crucial revenues
that could be poured into health care and other vital services.

As Mayor Gray so forcefully declared to the 250 people attending the
forum, Kelowna is a vibrant, growing city that cannot afford to waste
time by sticking its head in the sand and, therefore, must craft a
made-in-Kelowna solution. We citizens should applaud Mayor Gray for
offering us a window of opportunity on this problem. He probably is
Canada's first mayor bent on following Vancouver's lead in
implementing the so-called Four Pillars approach. That
strategy-developed in Switzerland and adopted by Vancouver two years
ago-calls for equal parts of treatment, enforcement, prevention, and
harm reduction.

Gray will meet Jan. 7 with a task force selected from last week's
speakers' panel and the audience. Their role will be to map a plan of
attack.

What Kelowna and Canada should strive for is a co-ordinated assault on
this drugs-crime virus by all three levels of government. And now that
the Four Pillars approach has been proposed, they might well
incorporate that strategy into the war.

Who knows, Mayor Gray could well cast the leadership mould for mayors
and cities throughout the country with his dedicated actions
addressing this very serious problem.

Wally Dennison

Kelowna