STATUS QUO WILL NOT SOLVE VANCOUVER'S DRUG PROBLEM

With drug-driven property crime at or near the top of every list of
business concerns in the Lower Mainland, it was amazing to hear the experts
at a recent drug policy seminar all pointing to the same solutions.

Equally amazing is the fierce resistance in some quarters to adopting those
solutions, because they require us to change our thinking about controlling
drug abuse. The only thing worse than some of these solutions is the status
quo. Based on what I heard at the Saving Money, Saving Lives conference
last week at Simon Fraser University, here are some things the business
community can do.

First, trust the Vancouver Agreement, which lays down a multi-government
plan of action built around the so-called four pillars of prevention, harm
reduction, treatment and enforcement. The answers and action plans have all
been ratified by virtually every major social and educational institution
in town, along with many business organizations. Understand the business
case for spending on prevention, treatment and harm reduction as well as
enforcement.

Respect the experience of Inspector Kash Heed from the vice and drugs
division of the Vancouver Police Department, who said, "We cannot arrest
our way out of the drug problem."

Look at the estimated $18 billion direct and indirect cost of illegal drug
use in Canada and ask yourself if that's the result of a successful
anti-drug strategy. Hear Patrick Basham's observation that most
drug-related crime is actually prohibition-related crime. Basham is with
the Cato Institute, having moved there from the Fraser Institute, where he
led its discussions on legalizing drugs
(oldfraser.lexi.net/publications/books/drug_papers).

"Ninety per cent of drug-related crime results, not from drug use, but from
the illegality of drugs," he pointed out. "Prohibition has created a
business environment in which there's nothing as profitable as smuggling
and selling drugs."

Prohibition also causes addicts to take a gamble on dosage, quality and
safety when they ingest. Every time they lose that gamble, society picks up
the health costs. One out of three new HIV cases is drug-related. Every new
HIV/AIDS patient drains an average of $150,000 in public spending.

Look at the criminal explosion that arose out of the failed North American
experiment with alcohol prohibition and ask yourself what's different about
the current crime wave driven by drug prohibition.

Recognize the difference between our instinctive reaction to this drug
chaos and the practical realities. The instinctive reaction - on seeing the
open drug market at Hastings and Main, the damage it's doing to businesses
in the area, the threat it offers to our Olympic bid - is to say, as one
developer did: "Just add 60 police officers to the neighbourhood and clean
it up."

But do the math. At $100,000 total cost for every police officer, that's $6
million a year to displace the problem and relocate it to other areas of
the Lower Mainland. In those areas, other police resources will be added to
displace it - back to the downtown area?

Then there's the immense cost of prosecution and ongoing incarceration.
Even if we could lock up all the addicts, drug use is rampant in jails,
from where the addicts will eventually emerge to resume breaking into cars
and homes.

One place where business can contribute is in generating employment in the
Downtown Eastside. Experienced business people are desperately needed to
get employment going, but someone has to convince people hardened by years
of dealing with unscrupulous slum landlords that just because business
investors get something in their pockets, the community doesn't lose.

Someone has to do the missionary work with elements in that community who
seem to have a perverse pride in having the poorest postal code in Canada,
perhaps because they benefit from keeping it that way. The gospel has to be
diversity. New residents who aren't desperate and strung out are good.
Mixed neighbourhoods are healthy neighbourhoods. Homeowners mixed with
renters are good. People with jobs, living in non-subsidized housing, add a
mix that's essential for local shops and services to survive. That means
looking at ways to upgrade the area without up-ending the community:
somewhere between another SRO hotel and a high-end tower.

But of all the things business could do, the most powerful would be for
Downtown Eastside property owners and merchants to lay down conditions
under which they would accept a safe injection site. In one European city,
they allowed one in on the condition that the neighbours could determine
its future by a referendum after a year. (They voted overwhelmingly to keep
it.) These sites have been proven to cut crime by 50 per cent. They
extricate users from the grip of their pushers, and they do it without the
"honey-pot" effect of attracting new users.

This is the most effective step that can be taken. It has the best chance
of providing immediate, measurable desirable results, however much they're
mixed with undesirable elements we wish we could eliminate but that we
never will.