TAX ADDICTIONS

About 75 per cent of homeless people have some sort of addiction
problem. The addictions -- whether to alcohol, illicit drugs, or even
gambling -- make it enormously difficult for the afflicted to find
employment or housing.

While it's now a worker's market, few employers are so desperate that
they'll risk hiring people too drunk or stoned to do the job. Addicts
need to clean up their acts. The problem is they need help -- lots of it.

Now that we've established that getting addicts to kick their
addictions is a key first step to getting them off the street, then
we should support efforts to do that.

Where will the money come from?

How about from liquor taxes and the government's share of gaming revenues?

We're prepared to go further and recommend legalization and
government control of other recreational drugs with sufficient taxes
raised to finance measures to help the addicts. We admit, though,
that a heroin tax will be a tough sell -- even in these enlightened
and permissive times. So let's stick with those booze tax dollars.

By increasing the total price of a product, a tax generally leads to
lower consumption. It makes sense, on the face of it anyway, that
anything that decreases alcohol consumption should reduce incidences
of alcohol addiction.

The tax regime can even be refined further -- so that the alcohol
itself is taxed. A study a couple of years ago by the Centre for
Addictions Research at the University of Victoria proposed a lower
tax rate for low-alcohol beer. In jurisdictions where
high-alcohol-content beer is taxed at a higher rate, sales of
low-alcohol beer are much higher than they are in Canada, the study found.

We suspect that reasonable consumers will support higher taxes on
alcohol if they know the money will help battle addictions.

Of course, curing addictions is notoriously difficult, as anyone who
has tried to stop smoking will attest. For any given patient, we can
expect failure the first time, the second time and even the third
time. Even after five or six treatment programs, there are no guarantees.

Note also that most addicts don't end up on the street. They manage
to hold onto their homes and even their jobs. The ones who become
homeless are, we should expect, among those with the most difficult
habits to kick.

British Columbia currently has net income from liquor sales of about
$800 million a year.

According to a government fact sheet, the province now spends $1
billion on mental health and addiction services and $328 million a
year on affordable housing and emergency shelters.

Those are big improvements over a few years ago, the government is
eager to tell us.

But it's time to spend more -- or maybe more wisely.

Let's test an idea social services agencies have been advocating for
years: that putting the money into addiction treatment and stable
housing will actually cost less than what is now spent on emergency
care and policing.

Build barracks if necessary. That's how the Indonesian government
housed refugees after the 2004 tsunami. It will take a commitment
from the addicts themselves though -- that they might have to move
away from downtown for treatment.

This really is an emergency. Let's treat it like one.