Pubdate: Wed, 02 Jul 2003 Source: North Shore News (CN BC) Copyright: 2003 North Shore News Contact: http://www.nsnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/311 Author: Leo Knight GIVING IN TO A LIBERAL DRUG POLICY IS FOLLY Vancouver Police Department (VPD) Insp. Doug LePard announced last week that the department will seek an additional $1.19 million in supplemental funding to continue the City Wide Enforcement Team's (CWET) drug enforcement efforts in the skids to the end of the year. A report will be presented to Vancouver council which, according to LePard, will outline the many positive results the initiative has had since its start on April 7. The COPE- dominated Vancouver council did not provide any of the dollars for VPD from the get-go and are now being asked to step up to the plate. And so they should. In simple terms, the CWET initiative has taken back the streets from the misery and death dealers who have had virtual impunity for the past half-dozen or so years. Their efforts to clean up the pocket of inhumanity known as the Downtown Eastside have been nothing short of miraculous despite what the poverty industry and the soft-on-drugs crowd would have you believe. The addicts have not been targeted, the dealers have. The proliferation of dealers of death have had their wings clipped and no longer are able to run what was once the nation's largest open-air drug bazaar. Yet, there are still the detractors - primarily in the poverty industry, but whose ranks have been joined by those who would have our community turn a blind eye to the death, destruction and human toll that drugs take. The federal government has cleared the way for a safe injection site to be opened in early September. Vancouver Mayor Larry Campbell rode this horse all the way to the corner office at 12th and Cambie and has touted it as some type of panacea for the drug troubles of his fair city. But far from being a panacea, in my view, this is little more than a small bandage being applied to a festering wound. The hand-wringers cite the so-called positive experiences of the European safe injection sites and their liberal thinking in terms of national drug policy. Switzerland and the Netherlands are often cited. Quite apart from the fact that it seems almost every elected official and a great many unelected ones have taken it upon themselves to venture off for their own excellent adventure travelling Europe on your dime, conducting their own research, it seems much of Europe has decided the liberalized approach hasn't worked well. Consider that since 1991, when safe injection sites became relatively common-place in the Netherlands, the Dutch Criminal Intelligence Service reports a 25 per cent increase in drug-related gun murders and a sharp rise in robberies in neighbourhoods housing any of the 50 official methadone clinics or injection shelters. Now, you won't hear the hand-wringers citing that report. Then there's the information that the Rotterdam City council has released that states the percentage of that city's 15- to 19-year-olds addicted to either heroin or cocaine has doubled since the late 1980s when it began its safe haven, safe injection program. Nor will you hear of the ECAD program, the acronym for the European Cities Against Drugs. More than 270 European cities, including such political lightweights as London, Paris, Stockholm and Madrid, have signed ECAD accords which call for a zero tolerance on drugs. Apparently not all the Europeans are as enlightened as the poverty industry and the legalize-drugs crowd would have you believe. Then there's Switzerland. Long a beacon of enlightenment, so you're told. Well the full story is not being told to you about that country either. The much-touted Needle Park in Zurich doesn't exist anymore. It was closed in 1992 after the public got fed up with the ancillary activities of the junkies, which included public urination, defecation, muggings, prostitution and gratuitous violence. The junkies were then moved to a safe-injection haven in a converted train station. To no one's great surprise, that closed in 1995 when the same problems kept occurring. But if the failures in other cities won't convince you of the folly of giving in to the liberalization of drug policy, perhaps the words of John Turvey, who has been fighting on the drug-infested streets of the Skids since the days when I worked in that cesspit. Turvey, a former addict, is no right-wing zealot. He was instrumental in starting the needle exchange program and has dedicated his life to undoing the harm that drugs cause. He was quoted as saying last fall that with all this emphasis on safe injection sites, people end up thinking it's the silver bullet. Turvey calls Vancouver a "marketer's fantasy" for organized crime and he believes that pandering to the drug lobby on this issue only facilitates that. He correctly points out that crack cocaine has taken over as the drug of choice and the average crack addict uses 20 to 30 times a day. To expect they will avail themselves of a safe injection site is pure nonsense. - --- MAP posted-by: Tom