BOYD'S TOWN

LANDSLIDE LARRY IS A NICE GUY, BUT HIS DRUG POLICY IS WRONGHEADED.

I met Landslide Larry Campbell at a party Saturday night and liked him
immediately.

Liked him, but join his holy crusade? I don't think so.

I was introduced to the new Vancouver mayor by his immediate predecessor,
Philip Owen, and the differences between the two throne-holders was
immediate and striking.

Despite his last-minute proletarian acclamation for getting out on downtown
Vancouver's shabbiest streets, Owen is still essentially the same patrician
he was when he first came under the political spotlight. He is a nervous
speaker and tries too hard to fit into a crowd. He, Campbell, West
Vancouver MLA Ralph Sultan and I spent 30 minutes squashed into a corner,
trading political barbs.

Campbell is a man's man, a bit boisterous, clearly self-confident, easy to
speak to, what you'd expect an old cop to be. It is rather remarkable that
Owen and Campbell should wind up sharing the same ideological tent,
conservative businessman, left-wing ex-cop. But they were able to get face
to face and agree on a proposed solution to the east-side's horrendous drug
problem.

Ultimately, and to the thorough surprise of most political theorists, it
was drugs, not jobs, not taxes, not economic reform, that pushed Campbell
and the dormant Committee of Progressive Electors to near total domination
of Vancouver council, school and park boards and the over-confident
incumbents out on their ears.

Specifically, it was the grandiose 'harm reduction theory' of drug reform
that worked for COPE, the notion that since you can't stop drug use,
minimize the havoc it causes by making the users as comfortable as
possible, with an easy supply of drugs, and an antiseptic place to use
them, and crime and drug-related death and disease will diminish.

I don't buy it. Never have. That method doesn't control drug use, it
facilitates it.

Alcoholics Anonymous has a handy word for that approach; they call it
"enabling," the creation of an environment that encourages continued drug
use by removing any call for self-control.

You may have noticed a progressively tolerant vocabulary for harm reduction
facilities. At first they were called shooting galleries. Then safe
injection sites. Now, tra-la, they are safe consumption facilities.

These will be the prominent places where, in theory, addicts can shoot
drugs with clean needles, watched over by nurses, doctors and counsellors.
Questions:

Will these places welcome equally heroin shooters, marijuana smokers, meth
heads, crack addicts and winos? They're all drug users.

How many nurses and doctors, will want to make a career of tending diseased
crack addicts, who have to shoot up 15, 20 times a day, just to stay sane?

How determinedly will the criminal element seek to control these sites, for
power and profit?

How long will it take for word to filter out to free-loading druggies all
across Canada that Vancouver is a vacation paradise?