GIVING IN TO A LIBERAL DRUG POLICY IS FOLLY

Vancouver Police Department (VPD) Insp. Doug LePard announced last week
that the department will seek an additional $1.19 million in supplemental
funding to continue the City Wide Enforcement Team's (CWET) drug
enforcement efforts in the skids to the end of the year.

A report will be presented to Vancouver council which, according to LePard,
will outline the many positive results the initiative has had since its
start on April 7. The COPE- dominated Vancouver council did not provide any
of the dollars for VPD from the get-go and are now being asked to step up
to the plate. And so they should.

In simple terms, the CWET initiative has taken back the streets from the
misery and death dealers who have had virtual impunity for the past
half-dozen or so years. Their efforts to clean up the pocket of inhumanity
known as the Downtown Eastside have been nothing short of miraculous
despite what the poverty industry and the soft-on-drugs crowd would have
you believe.

The addicts have not been targeted, the dealers have. The proliferation of
dealers of death have had their wings clipped and no longer are able to run
what was once the nation's largest open-air drug bazaar.

Yet, there are still the detractors - primarily in the poverty industry,
but whose ranks have been joined by those who would have our community turn
a blind eye to the death, destruction and human toll that drugs take.

The federal government has cleared the way for a safe injection site to be
opened in early September. Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell rode this horse
all the way to the corner office at 12th and Cambie and has touted it as
some type of panacea for the drug troubles of his fair city.

But far from being a panacea, in my view, this is little more than a small
bandage being applied to a festering wound. The hand-wringers cite the
so-called positive experiences of the European safe injection sites and
their liberal thinking in terms of national drug policy. Switzerland and
the Netherlands are often cited. Quite apart from the fact that it seems
almost every elected official and a great many unelected ones have taken it
upon themselves to venture off for their own excellent adventure travelling
Europe on your dime, conducting their own research, it seems much of Europe
has decided the liberalized approach hasn't worked well.

Consider that since 1991, when safe injection sites became relatively
common-place in the Netherlands, the Dutch Criminal Intelligence Service
reports a 25 per cent increase in drug-related gun murders and a sharp rise
in robberies in neighbourhoods housing any of the 50 official methadone
clinics or injection shelters. Now, you won't hear the hand-wringers citing
that report.

Then there's the information that the Rotterdam City council has released
that states the percentage of that city's 15- to 19-year-olds addicted to
either heroin or cocaine has doubled since the late 1980s when it began its
safe haven, safe injection program. Nor will you hear of the ECAD program,
the acronym for the European Cities Against Drugs. More than 270 European
cities, including such political lightweights as London, Paris, Stockholm
and Madrid, have signed ECAD accords which call for a zero tolerance on
drugs. Apparently not all the Europeans are as enlightened as the poverty
industry and the legalize-drugs crowd would have you believe.

Then there's Switzerland. Long a beacon of enlightenment, so you're told.
Well the full story is not being told to you about that country either.

The much-touted Needle Park in Zurich doesn't exist anymore. It was closed
in 1992 after the public got fed up with the ancillary activities of the
junkies, which included public urination, defecation, muggings,
prostitution and gratuitous violence. The junkies were then moved to a
safe-injection haven in a converted train station. To no one's great
surprise, that closed in 1995 when the same problems kept occurring.

But if the failures in other cities won't convince you of the folly of
giving in to the liberalization of drug policy, perhaps the words of John
Turvey, who has been fighting on the drug-infested streets of the Skids
since the days when I worked in that cesspit. Turvey, a former addict, is
no right-wing zealot. He was instrumental in starting the needle exchange
program and has dedicated his life to undoing the harm that drugs cause.

He was quoted as saying last fall that with all this emphasis on safe
injection sites, people end up thinking it's the silver bullet.

Turvey calls Vancouver a "marketer's fantasy" for organized crime and he
believes that pandering to the drug lobby on this issue only facilitates that.

He correctly points out that crack cocaine has taken over as the drug of
choice and the average crack addict uses 20 to 30 times a day.

To expect they will avail themselves of a safe injection site is pure nonsense.