THIS QUICK FIX WON'T WORK

John Turvey doesn't think much of safe injection sites for drug addicts. He
thinks the "harm-reduction initiatives" that are all the rage in
health-policy circles these days are likely to add to the harm, not reduce
it. Ask him what Vancouver's wretched drug community needs most, and he'll
tell you tougher enforcement and more policing.

"With all this emphasis on safe injection sites, people end up thinking
it's the silver bullet," he says. "The bleeding-heart liberal group
basically have their heads up their ass."

Mr. Turvey is no hard-line right-winger. He's the executive director of
street services for the Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society, which
runs services for street kids. He started Canada's first needle exchange in
1988; today, his outfit distributes 3.5 million needles a year. A former
addict himself, he favours decriminalization. And he probably has more
firsthand experience with the drug crisis than anyone else in Canada.

Safe injection sites were the headline issue in Vancouver's mayoralty race.
And now Health Canada, Anne McLellan's ministry, is on the verge of giving
them the go-ahead across the country. The idea has the endorsement of Allan
Rock, the former and current mayors of Vancouver, and numerous
health-policy activists, advocacy groups and doctors. They could be coming
soon to a neighbourhood near you.

The rationale for safe injection sites is that drug addicts need help, not
punishment. They'll get a safe, clean place where they can be taught the
right and wrong ways to shoot up. Proponents say harm reduction is both
compassionate and pragmatic, because it will save on health-care costs.
Opponents say tolerating substance abuse and facilitating their addictions
send exactly the wrong message. Proponents respond that moralism has no
place in managing a public-health crisis.

People who argue for the benefits of harm reduction point to the success of
cities such as Amsterdam and Frankfurt. (It's hard to find a government
drug-policy researcher who hasn't jetted off to Europe lately.) What's not
so well-known is that many other European cities, including Stockholm,
Berlin, Paris, London, Helsinki and Madrid, have rejected safe injection
sites and are lobbying against them.

Mr. Turvey's objections aren't of the moral variety. They're pragmatic. For
example, he doubts many addicts would use the safe injection sites. "We
have a crack and cocaine culture here. In Europe, it's mostly heroin." He
adds: "Crack addicts fix compulsively 20 or 30 times a day. They won't walk
a block to the needle exchange."

Even so, he figures safe injection sites will help make Vancouver's
Downtown Eastside an even bigger magnet for addicts than it already is. And
with more addicts come more traffickers, loan sharks and other criminals.
"For organized crime, we're a marketer's fantasy."

But the police can't do much to protect the addicts or catch the criminals
because they are terribly understaffed. The Vancouver force is a fraction
of the size of Frankfurt's or Amsterdam's. There are hardly any detox beds
available. On top of that, B.C.'s drug laws are notoriously soft on
trafficking. "We've really deserted the police department," Mr. Turvey
says. "The dealers have lawyers paid for by the state and they're out in 24
hours and back in business."

Meantime, the Immigration Department has let in armies of foreign drug
dealers, many of them from Latin America. A record of drug trafficking is
evidently no barrier to claiming refugee status. "The federal government
does not have control over their immigration services here in Vancouver,"
Mr. Turvey says.

And no one has begun debating some of the more troublesome issues raised by
legal shooting galleries. Will we let teenagers have access to them? If
not, why not? After all, it's illegal to deny teenagers access to other
health services, such as abortion. And how will we deal with addicts who
refuse to shoot up where we want them to? "In Europe, if you don't use the
injection site, they bar you from the area," Mr. Turvey says. "But that's
illegal here."

The good news is that drug deaths in Vancouver have fallen sharply. (You
won't hear this from the harm reductionists, who like to inflate the
statistics to prove how necessary their ideas are.) The decline, says Mr.
Turvey, is due not to the progressive treatment of addicts but to some
major drug busts, which got some of the traffickers off the streets and
dried up access to hyper-pure narcotics.

"I think harm reduction has been a blessing for academics and the medical
community," Mr. Turvey says. "It's given them something that makes them
feel they have a purpose in life." In other words, a quick fix. Too bad it
won't work.