Pubdate: Sat, 16 Sep 2000
Source: The Daily Courier (CN BC)
Copyright: 2000 The Daily Courier
Page: A10
Contact:  550 Doyle Ave., Kelowna, B.C. V1Y 7V1
Website: http://www.ok.bc.ca/dc/
Author: Paul Willcocks
Note: Paul Willcocks is a Victoria freelance journalist who covers the 
legislature.  His column appears Wednesday and Saturday.
Bookmark: additional articles on heroin are available at 
http://www.mapinc.org/heroin.htm and articles on Canada are available at 
http://www.mapinc.org/canada.htm

HEROIN WAR A TERRIBLE FAILURE

Good news. The police have grabbed another couple of big loads of heroin, 
inconveniencing some criminals - and making it more likely that your home 
will be broken into.

That's not the headline.  But ultimately, it's the only real effect of last 
week's big heroin seizures in Toronto and Vancouver.

Addicts aren't going to quit because police seized heroin hidden in phoney 
duck eggs.  The dealers are going to keep dealing, users will keep using, 
and a chunk of them will keep doing crime or selling their bodies to pay 
for their habits.

It looked great, police in Toronto posing with the duck eggs that the 
smugglers had used to hide heroin coming in from China.  About 1,700 of the 
174,000 duck eggs were plastic, and filled with 57 kilograms of heroin.  In 
Vancouver, police seized almost 100 kilograms of heroin concealed in a 
container.

It was a big haul and police deserve congratulations for grabbing the drugs 
and arresting 10 people.  They're doing the job we asked them to take on.

But what's the real effect? Here in Victoria the head of the strike force 
aimed at drugs and property crimes had a warning.

"You could expect to see more property crimes taking place, more thefts, 
maybe even more robberies," he said. "A lot of times we find that people 
who do robberies are either high on drugs or are looking for money to buy 
more drugs."

Seizing heroin doesn't end addiction.  It doesn't even stop the supply, 
just slows it down enough that users have a harder time finding drugs and 
prices go up for a while.

That also means people may die.  Whenever supply is interrupted, users end 
up trying to find new sources.  Sometimes other drugs are substituted for 
heroin; sometimes the new supply is of higher purity. The result can be 
instant death.  More than 200 people have already died of drug overdoses in 
B.C.this year, in communities across the province. Young, old, men, women, 
all gone.  More adults lost to drugs than to car crashes.

And it's not just an urban problem, something for people on the grimy 
streets of Vancouver's East Side.  Here in the Kelowna area almost 50 died 
of drug overdoses between 1993 and 1998.  Through the Okanagan, more than 250.

More deaths, more crime, a few people in jail, the same number of addicts. 
It doesn't sound like any sort of victory.  After 40 years of using the 
same tactics in the war on drugs, without any success, isn't it time for a 
change?

I'm not saying we should abandon the war against drug smugglers.  But it's 
a waste of our energy, money and thousands of lives to ignore the immediate 
opportunities to come up with a sensible policy that will solve many of the 
real problems associated with drug use.

What's sensible? Two years ago the province's former chief medical health 
officer offered his prescription.  Create a substance abuse commission to 
replace the fractured efforts now in place.  Increase detox spaces by 50 
per cent.  Expand methadone treatment and make it free, since current costs 
of more than $500 a month deter people from entering the program.

And, bravely, he proposed a test of legal heroin for those who qualify.  A 
similar experiment in Switzerland conducted on 1,100 addicts found no 
overdose deaths, a massive reduction in criminal activity by the addicts, 
and an increase in employment.  More than 80 people even quit drugs during 
the trial.

Controversial, certainly.  But shouldn't it be more controversial that we 
continue stupidly to follow a drug policy that has proven, over decades, to 
be ineffective?

Let's make a commitment.  For every dollar we spend on enforcement, we'll 
spend five on harm reduction.  We'll work to provide education, not only so 
people don't start but so they act safely if they do begin using drugs. 
(AIDS, HIV and other infectious diseases are widespread in intravenous drug 
users.) We'll provide methadone, legal heroin and safe places to inject. 
We'll treat this as a medical problem instead of a criminal one.

It sound spectacular, a seizure of millions of dollars worth of heroin. But 
it does nothing to reduce the damage done in our communities by drugs.  It 
doesn't stop someone from that first experiment with heroin; it doesn't 
help anyone quit; it doesn't reduce crime, or the terrible loss of life.

The old way hasn't worked.  It's time for change.
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MAP posted-by: Thunder