MAYOR SACRIFICING INJECTION SITE

Dr. David Marsh couldn't believe what he was hearing when he was told
that Mayor Sam Sullivan was prepared to shut down Vancouver's
supervised injection site if the Tories would let his drug
substitution program get off the ground.

Sullivan has lobbied for the drug substitution idea in Ottawa for more
than a year. His solution to addiction is substituting prescription
pills for illegal stimulants including crystal meth and cocaine.

Even though all the research claims the injection site is a successful
harm reduction tool, Stephen Harper's new Tory government doesn't like
it. It was an idea supported by the Liberals. It involved the use of
illegal drugs. Harper's Minister of Health, Tony Clement, has looked
for reasons to shut down the site. Last year he gave it an 18-month
reprieve until December while asking for more research. I'm told the
research is yet to get under way.

Sullivan's plan, while untested in any significant way, is incredibly
ambitious. He says it will involve 1,000 addicts. The NAOMI Heroin
trials in Vancouver has about 180 addicts.

Sullivan once again excluded city staff when he decided to proceed
with his scheme to develop a proposal the Tories might buy. He created
a private charity, the Inner Change Society. He hand-picked the
executive director, Lois Johnson, a longtime Tory who worked on
Clement's unsuccessful leadership bid. He appointed the board of
directors, including Dr. Don Rix, one of his wealthy donors, Tory
heavyweight John Reynolds and NDP trophy Joy MacPhail.

He personally raised seed money for the society and hired the PR firm
Reputations, run by his close confidante Wayne Hartrick, to help
launch the project. (Reputations is one of two PR firms Sullivan
regularly uses. The other is Norman Stowe's Pace Group. Pace launched
Sullivan's Civil City Project. Taxpayers paid that bill.)

Sullivan also put together the project's clinical advisory committee.
The chair of that committee is Marsh, who also works for Vancouver
Coastal Health and is the supervisor of the supervised injection site.

Marsh's committee has so far briefly sketched out five drug trials as
part of its proposal. It has not discussed these proposals with the
society's board of directors, not that that makes any difference.
Nothing will go forward unless Sullivan signs off on it.

When I told Marsh about Sullivan's recent comments that he would
"never" see the injection site as a "long term solution," Marsh said
that those comments were something Sullivan said months ago. But Marsh
said shutting down the site once the substitution program was underway
was discussed and rejected. It was now "off the table." In fact,
Sullivan's comments were made late last week.

Marsh has no idea how fundraising is going for the drug trials. The
public has no right to know how much has been collected or who is
supporting this project. As for Johnson, the executive director, she
planned to bail out on May 1, but is hanging around until a substitute
is found.

Marsh is not the only one surprised by Sullivan's comments. Ray Hall,
one of the founders of the West Side group From Grief to
Action-composed of parents of addicts-predicted a "furor" over
Sullivan's admission.

"We always knew where he was coming from," he said of Sullivan. "Now
we have it in print."

The supervised injection site is at the heart of everything former
mayor Philip Owen worked for in his Four Pillars Approach to drug
addiction. His successor, Larry Campbell, worked passionately to get
it up and running.

Now it looks like Sullivan is willing to sacrifice it, in spite of its
success and broad public support. All so he can rebrand the drug
policy as his own with a project that is untested but more palatable
to his Tory buddies.