NEEDLE USE IS A CONCERN

A former Burnaby school trustee says council needs a better understanding of
the city's drug problems if it hopes to combat issues such as crime and
child prostitution.

"My experience tells me that drug use in Burnaby is rampant. Just because we
live in a pretty city doesn't mean that the problem isn't there," said Barb
Fisher, a former BVNPA school trustee who served on the city's child
exploitation task force from 1997-2002.

Fisher contacted the NOW this week in repsonse to a recent article in which
the ruling BCA councillors voiced differing opinions on whether the city
should host safe injection sites.

Coun. Nick Volkow is in favour of the idea, while his BCA colleagues Sav
Dhaliwal and Colleen Jordan said Burnaby's drug woes were not severe enough
to warrant such action.

But Fisher said the current council needs to take a much closer look at
what's going on around the city, from the back alleys on Kingsway to the
playgrounds at our schools.

"They sounded like these people didn't have a clue what's going on," Fisher
said, noting that several of the councillors have stated that Burnaby's drug
problem isn't nearly as large as Vancouver's.

While that may be so, Fisher said, she believes the city shouldn't use the
size of the problem to justify the need for services such as safe injection
sites, detox centres, counselling and education programs.

"You can't sit back and wait for the problem to get worse," Fisher said,
adding that safe injection sites will be useless unless the other support
facilities and programs are in place.

"If you just have a safe injection site, it's a revolving door - people come
in one door, out the other and then they're back again," Fisher said. "They
need a place to go to for treatment, otherwise they never get out of the
system.

In the past, BCA mayor Derek Corrigan and councillor Dan Johnston have
acknowledged the city's drug problems but have expressed concerns that the
public would be reluctant to allow facilities such as detox centres and
homeless shelters into their communities.

But Fisher said the city needs to look to the work it accomplished through
the child exploitation task force as an example of what can be gained from
"providing a way out" to those at risk.

"When we worked on the child sex strategy, we knew that they needed a place
to go where they could get out, and we did that with our safe house," Fisher
said, referring to a city-owned shelter where kids invovled in the sex trade
can go to escape their abusers and begin putting their life back together.

"We could be putting so many of these city-owned houses to good use."

Fisher said she'd like to see the city form a drug and alcohol task force
similar to the one she served on to combat child exploitation.

The child sex task force, she said, was comprised of elected officials,
front line community workers, counsellors and police representatives.

Round table discussions were often held with experts familiar with the
issues, as well as justice officials such as BC provincial court judge
Thomas Gove.

If the same sort of arrangement was made to tackle drugs in the community,
Fisher said, council would soon see that many of its social problems are
linked.

They'd also learn more about the growing epidemic of drug use by teens and
young children, Fisher said, noting that many studies suggest a growing
number of kids are experimenting with intravenous cocktails of heroin,
cocaine and other drugs.

"When you really get into issues this way the unfortunate thing is that you
soon learn far more than you ever wanted to know about what's really going
on out there," Fisher said.