GREENS 'AHEAD OF TIME' ON DRUG POLICY

Supporting safe injection sites may have helped COPE win the recent civic
election campaign, but the party wasn't the first to champion the issue,
says the civic Greens' only elected member.

Andrea Reimer, trustee-elect for the school board, said the Greens started
advocating for safe injection sites as early as 1996, but when the two
left-leaning parties ran a joint slate of candidates in 1999 to unseat the
NPA, the Greens were forced to downplay their position.

"The Green Party's top issues were safe injection sites and harm
reduction," Reimer said. "[But] COPE at the time made us remove it from all
our campaign literature in the coalition and now they talk about nothing but."

On the last page of the Greens' 1999 four-page information brochure,
produced on newsprint, the party promised to support harm reduction and
"establish safe injection sites in order to reduce public drug use,
overdose deaths and the spread of disease."

After COPE officials objected, a sticker covered the words on copies that
were mailed out, while, in other instances, a black marker was used to
cross out the two offending lines. "Make your vote count" was written in
pen over top.

Reimer said COPE leadership wanted to avoid the issue entirely, and the
Green Party was prepared to comply to maintain the alliance.

"When you're working in a coalition, the importance of it seems more
important than having a large public fight over a controversial issue," she
said. "For the Green Party itself, it was quite a bone of contention, but
we tried to keep it in the party."

Not long after the '99 election, however, Mayor Philip Owen, a member of
the NPA, began championing harm reduction as one of four pillars in solving
the drug problem in the Downtown Eastside, along with prevention, treatment
and enforcement.

Safe injection sites, backed by mayor-elect Larry Campbell and other COPE
candidates, went on to become a central issue in the latest election.

COPE spokesman Neil Monckton said the party didn't have a firm position on
the issue in 1999 because not much information was available.

"There was an agreement that any policy announcement [the Greens] made
would be in consultation with David Cadman, as the mayoral candidate at the
time," he said.

"Some of the members of their party who weren't running took it upon
themselves to release a policy paper on a number of issues related to the
drug crisis-some of which we supported, some of which we didn't."

But Monckton, who was COPE's communication director at the time, said he
doesn't remember demanding the Greens erase information from their
material. "All I know is we had a long, protracted discussion around a
press release."

COPE Coun. Fred Bass, who was re-elected Nov. 16, acknowledged he only
began backing the concept of safe injection sites as one element in a drug
strategy after Owen released information about Frankfurt's experience. "The
Frankfurt data wasn't available in 1999 or at least I hadn't seen it."

Reimer said bringing issues forward has always been more important to the
party than having its candidates elected. "We're a little bit ahead of our
time, but it's still happening, which is what's important to us."