NO QUICK FIX

The screening of Fix: The Story of an Addicted City and the forum that
followed provides another opportunity to face up to local drug issues.

While the local problem certainly isn't as bad as that faced by larger
centres, it bears remembering that many of those who end up on Vancouver's
downtown east side are from the province's smaller communities, the
Interior included.

The city and RCMP are currently working on a cooperative plan to crack down
on drug houses. But where do drug users go once their regular haunts are no
longer available?

The addiction doesn't go away just because we want it to. That's where safe
injection sites and a street nursing program come in - the humdingers of
all politically sensitive issues, as former Vancouver Mayor Phil Owen
discovered.

Safe injection sites provide clean needles and medical support and act as
resource to encourage alternatives and promote rehabilitation and treatment
programs.

And street nursing programs see health-care professionals patrol the areas
frequented by users and act as a resource, providing information on drug
outreach.

Owen's four pillars approach - prevention, treatment, enforcement and
harm-reduction - is, along with talk of taking drug abuse off the streets
and putting it where it can be monitored, politically sensitive because
many like to pretend the drug problem doesn't exist. But in reality, drug
addicts live next door. They are from good as well as "bad" families and
may have kids of their own. They are people, just like cigarette smokers or
those who abuse alcohol.

The U.S. government's zero-tolerance approach has seen prison populations
swell to unprecedented numbers. Regions in the Pacific Northwest and New
Mexico are now looking for alternatives to incarceration.

The justice system is doing all it can do and its not enough.

So the war on drugs has many surrendering or looking to Vancouver for
alternatives. But no one city can do it alone. Safe injection sites require
special federal legislation as they must include a buffer zone of drug-free
activity. And the province has to kick in some cash as well look at the
wait lists for rehab programs.

But when the problem is just ignored, everyone suffers.

Drug users are not disposable like the needles they exchange.