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BLACK-SHEEP COMMENTARIES VANCOUVER’S UNDERBELLY A SORE BE on guard, citizens of North and West Vancouver, against a two-faced City of Vancouver. Vancouver’s Skid Road is a low-life drug mecca and a de facto decriminalized drug zone; made even more intolerable now that it is being subjected to Europe’s pie-in-the-sky four-pillar solution to epidemic drug addiction and trafficking.
Nevertheless, Vancouver is regarded as a world-class destination when judged by its astounding inner-city rejuvenation.
I get angry when Vancouver’s civic leaders and promoters expound on the wonderful redevelopment of Coal Harbour and False Creek but avoid, like the plague, any mention of the festering sore of Skid Road.
The most recent example is an article by Linda Baker, “Spurring Growth In Vancouver,” published in the New York Times on Christmas Day.
Baker described Vancouver as unlike all other North American cities that have “attracted thousands of new residents to revitalized downtown living.” She noted that Vancouver is the only city where the number of children living downtown has increased dramatically – doubling since 1990 to 5,000 children living in the central core. Baker said: “Last year, the city opened the first new elementary school in an inner-city neighbourhood in more than 30 years.” Her tribute ends with a comment by an enthusiastic downtown resident, Simon Hill, whose two children are enrolled in False Creek elementary, on the seawall, with views of residential skyscrapers, snowcapped Grouse Mountain and English Bay. “Just think of the mental landscape the kids are getting,” he said.
But wait a minute, Mr. Hill – the physical landscape in downtown Vancouver is appalling; it is infiltrated by as many as 6,000 addicts and their number is rising.
How have these pestilent addicts, children of an earlier generation, been able to permeate the heart of the city and now, on a one-to-one ratio, put today’s inner-city kids at risk? This deplorable situation has been exacerbated by Vancouver’s four-pillar propaganda approach to the city’s drug epidemic. Vancouver has accepted a Trojan Horse, a Wooden Horse of Skid Road, containing only one pillar, inaccurately labeled “harm reduction.” And if you peal back the cover of harm reduction you find advocates of decriminalization with their utopian promises of drug regulation. Harm reduction, supposedly achievable through safe-injection sites, needle exchange, dependence on methadone, and free opiate trials, is an illusion. Yet it is so rife with statistics that in the hands of proselytizers who urge you to accept addiction as an illness and addicts as victims, the health approach becomes a siren song. My skepticism of them is driven by Disraeli’s caution that “there are lies, damned lies and statistics.” These visionaries proclaim criminalization a failure and offer, with no guarantees, a bureaucrats’ public health approach using regulatory distribution of hard drugs. They would have us prostrate ourselves before a new Canadian ideology: the regulated manufacture and supply of narcotics and hallucinogens as part of an inherent whimsical lawful right to psychoactive decadence The Wooden Horse of Skid Road first appeared on November 21, 2000, when then-mayor Philip Owen unveiled a sweeping plan for the Vancouver’s drug crisis. He promised equal effort in prevention, treatment, enforcement of the law, and harm reduction; and proposed safe injection sites, free heroin for hard-core users, testing the strength of heroin and cocaine, and social centres for addicts. Owen ignored the urgent need for detoxification facilities and residential premises to house addicts attempting abstinence. It was all words and no action during his remaining two years in office. On November 16, 2002, Larry Campbell became mayor – an even louder one-note voice in a campaign for safe injection sites. In 2003 a site was opened on a trial basis and to date it has been nothing more than a cosmetic solution for Vancouver’s festering sore. On December 5, 2005, Sam Sullivan became mayor of Vancouver. In his inaugural remarks Sullivan made no mention of the squalor of Skid Road Vancouver and the vulnerability of law-abiding citizens beset by addicts and traffickers. But in tune with his one-note predecessors Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum, Mayor Sullivan likened addiction to a disability. Such dimness should earn him the moniker of Tweedle Dim. In my Dec. 14 column I commented on an Oct. 19 symposium – an international gathering of thought leaders propounding a scheme for the regulatory distribution of drugs. The focal point of their “shared vision of the future” was a discussion paper of the Health Officers Council of British Columbia. The discussion paper listed some of the regulatory approaches or mechanisms to be considered. It is more than bureaucratic absolutism. It is March hare madness. Here’s the gist of some of them:
Consider this windy diffusion: “The clustering of regulatory techniques should be applied in varying degrees to different drugs (which) vary widely in their potential for both harm and benefit.” And this Orwellian nightmare: “Assessment: disease surveillance, needs identification, causal analysis, data collection and interpretation, case finding, monitoring and forecasting trends, research, and service outcome and evaluation.” It resonates with scenes from a social scientist’s outdoor laboratory in which drug addicts take the place of laboratory rats. And inanities become “truths”:
Addiction is an acute and debilitating dependency combined, invariably, with antisocial and criminal behavior. It must never be accepted and tolerated Our obligation as a humane society is to offer help to addicts – yet jail must await those who refuse detoxification, counselling, and abstinence, and become parasites on law-abiding citizens through non-stop theft, burglary and robbery. Enablement and continuance of drug addiction through a bureaucratic regulatory system providing free drugs is nothing more than inhumane pandering to behavior that is contrary to the fundamental values and decency in our free society. The vast majority of Canadians are men and women of honour and virtue who pride themselves in using civility and restraint in their dealing with each other. And they accept and live within the primary truth in our constitution: that our country and our culture – notwithstanding the foolishness of the Supreme Court in it’s tolerance of sex swingers and swappers – is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law. All law-abiding citizens are bound together in a never-ending struggle to fulfill a self-evident obligation: to give our children safe passage to adulthood, imbuing them with moral and ethical qualities so that when their turn comes they may engage in the richness of being family men and women as we have tried to be. We have a duty to keep the bureaucrats of the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority at bay and refuse them the opportunity to conduct Vancouver’s ongoing mad experiment on the North Shore.
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