July 2007: INSITE and STREETS of SHAME

Elizabeth James – North Vancouver

Former Judge Wallace Craig says words that many in the community are thinking but hesitate to say: Insite Should Be Closed Now, North Shore News, June 13, 2007. 

Hopefully, Craig's article will encourage an open exchange of ideas before apologists, who have an interest in the continuation of such a seriously-flawed experiment as Insite, stifle discussion with politically-correct arguments. 

When the four-pillar concept was proposed, it sounded good to well-meaning but inexperienced folks who were sincere in their desire to help the drug-addicted out of their misery. 

Unfortunately, their sober-second-thought questions were swept aside as opportunists climbed onto the Insite bandwagon. Five years on, it has become obvious that, as implemented, the experiment has done little to help the addicted - and a lot to boost the aspirations of its proponents. 

Craig has seen and dealt first-hand with the criminal fallout of drug dealing and addiction. A few scant blocks distant, David Berner - who later became a talk-show host - worked among and for the hundreds of addicts who roamed Vancouver's meanest streets. 

Craig and Berner believed that a safe injection site, by itself, would do little to reduce the overall drug problem. They knew. They said. They were ignored. Their words were not a comfortable fit for politicians - or for the politically-correct and their drug-addicted 'clients'. 

While Vancouver’s city hall politicians came and went, the newly-elected provincial government virtually guaranteed failure of this never-more-than-one-pillar program. 

Their first move was a costly review of those collecting welfare that, in the end, found only 40 or so recipients who were not entitled to assistance. Our provincial government then compounded the problem by completing the shut-down of Riverview, the only mental-health care facility in the province, without first providing, or at least identifying, suitable alternative accommodation. 

With no means of support and nowhere to go, it was inevitable that many patients gravitated to the streets, and, along with the indigent, too many turned to drugs to make money enough to stay alive and to dull the incredible pain of their existence. 

From the beginning, Craig and Berner could have told the Campbell Liberals that, without the essential first pillar, encouraging addicts to shoot-up at Insite would not help them to get off drugs or the street. 

Thus, in 2007, drug dealers still ply their trade, and police crackdowns succeed only in moving the crimes from one street to another. Jaded courts have little option but to turn the addicts back onto the street, and harried, burned-out paramedics and ER staff still deal with the addicted and the beaten night after night, day after day, year in year out. 

So, if not Insite, what? How about these recommendations for discussion:

• Evaluation: Put a team of mental-health professionals - doctors, nurse-practitioners, social services and aboriginal workers - into the heart of the Downtown Eastside. Screen as many of the homeless and drug-addicted as possible, identify those who are mentally-ill and send a list to the Minister of Health, with a demand that they be properly housed and cared for.
• Deportation: Deport all non-Canadian drug dealers. No refugee claims, no lawyers, no supporting them in prison or otherwise. Out - and don't come back.
• Penalties: For all others found guilty of dealing - downtown or not - higher minimum sentences, massive fines, and confiscation of assets.
   

Then, when the care of those remaining can be more easily managed:

• Treatment: Implement the Foundation Pillar: Mandatory, cold turkey, tough love in a dedicated treatment facility - for long enough to dull the craving, long enough to rebuild health and fitness, and long enough to give the willing some effective life-skills.

What I propose would be expensive, but far less expensive, surely, than the bill to maintain the status quo that has burdened our communities for far too long.

In the introduction to their 1990 book, Madness in the Streets: How Psychiatry and the Law abandoned the Mentally Ill, Isaac and Armat say this: "In 1949, journalist Albert Deutsch wrote the Shame of the States, an indictment of the appalling conditions in state mental hospitals. Today, he would surely indict "the shame of the streets." Many of our modern institutions for the mentally ill exist in the open air: parks, alleys, vacant lots, steam grates on our city pavements." 

Nearly 60 years after Deutsch and less than three years before the world is invited to the 2010 Olympics, it is our shame that such a condition is being perpetuated on the streets of Vancouver and throughout British Columbia. 

Judge Craig is right. Insite should be closed now - and, when it is, an apolitical, comprehensive and effective residential treatment program must take its place.