Pubdate: Sat, 31 May 2008
Source: Ottawa Citizen (CN ON)
Copyright: 2008 The Ottawa Citizen
Contact: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/letters.html
Website: http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/326
Author: Dan Gardner
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?142 (Supervised Injection Sites)
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/topic/insite (Insite)

AN IRRATIONAL AND STUPID DRUG POLICY

The government's handling of drug policy is so ignorant and foolish 
it is a challenge to explain why in a newspaper column. To expound on 
stupidity of this magnitude requires a very long book.

But two images from this week do come close to capturing the full absurdity.

The first is Tony Clement appearing before a Commons committee to 
declare his government's opposition to the current operation of 
Insite, the Vancouver safe-injection pilot project.

"In my opinion, supervised injection is not medicine," the minister 
told the committee. "It does not heal the person addicted to drugs."

The government wants to focus on treating addicts, the minister of 
health said, and preventing people from using drugs in the first place.

For anyone unfamiliar with drug policy, this sounds sweetly 
reasonable. Why, of course we should help get addicts off drugs! Why, 
yes, it would be best if we stopped people from using drugs at all! 
Who could possibly disagree?

People who actually know something about drugs and drug addiction, that's who.

The reason why harm reduction policies like Insite came into 
existence is precisely because treatment routinely fails. Even the 
best treatment. Even if it's lavishly funded. Some addicts will keep 
using -- for another year, for another decade, for the rest of their 
lives. Harm reduction is about keeping those people alive and healthy 
until they do kick their habits, or, in the case of the few who never 
will, keeping them alive and healthy and not spreading disease and disorder.

I've seen it at work in the Netherlands. Imagine healthy heroin 
addicts. With jobs. And apartments. And families. Addicts who are not 
a blight on the community. It's all thanks to an array of harm 
reduction programs which this country is too timid to even try.

I've also seen how addicts live in the United States, the western 
country that has most vigorously rejected harm reduction -- and the 
western country with the highest drug-related fatality rate.

As for prevention, well, that's a terrific idea. Except that real 
prevention means dealing with the social decay -- broken families, 
mental illness, illiteracy -- that promotes drug abuse. This 
government seems to think prevention means running television 
commercials as vapid and worthless as the Reagan-era "this is your 
brain on drugs" ad that is the classic of the genre.

There's also some rich historical irony in Mr. Clement's comment 
about the safe-injection facility not being medicine because it 
doesn't get addicts off drugs. That's precisely what the U.S. Supreme 
Court said in March, 1919, when it banned "maintenance" programs -- 
which involved doctors prescribing the drug to which patients were addicted.

A major factor in the court's thinking was the widespread belief at 
the time that addiction could be cured easily thanks to a marvelous 
treatment invented by Charles B. Towns, a failed stockbroker. 
Unfortunately, it was realized not long after the ruling that Towns 
was a quack. But by then, it was too late. All maintenance programs 
had been shut down and the drug problems we are now so familiar with 
- -- black markets, violence, disease -- sprouted in American cities.

In the United Kingdom, by contrast, maintenance remained the central 
policy for another 45 years. In all that time, the underworld drug 
scene scarcely existed.

Of course, Mr. Clement probably thinks this is all ancient history. 
Who cares, right? Well, this history is being repeated.

Every decade or two in this country, there's another scare about 
drugs. And every decade or two, the government quickly and firmly 
rejects real alternatives to the status quo. And every decade or two 
ministers and police chiefs tell parliamentary committees that the 
solution is prevention, treatment and law enforcement -- and they say 
this with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of ignoramuses who think they 
are the first to ever utter these sparkling words.

So there was Tony Clement on Thursday doing the same old song and 
dance before yet another parliamentary committee. Whether he knew how 
silly he sounded promising change in the form of a nearly 
one-century-old status quo, I cannot say. I doubt it. His wide-eyed 
enthusiasm looked only too genuine.

That was the first of the two images I promised at the outset of this 
column. The other? It's the military's latest recruiting ad.

Picture this: A warship rushes toward an unidentified vessel, where 
men are seen hurriedly pushing large containers overboard. Heavily 
armed soldiers storm aboard. Evil-doers are taken down at gunpoint. 
Cut to a press conference where an official shows off seized drugs. 
"Fight chaos," the tagline reads.

The overwhelming majority of the money Canada spends on drug policy 
goes to law enforcement. And that's not including what the Defence 
Department spends. I don't know how much it costs to send a warship 
out on patrol for a day, but I suspect it could keep Insite open for a year.

Insite, however, is supported by peer-reviewed scientific research. 
There is shockingly little evidence that law enforcement actually 
accomplishes what it's supposed to. In fact, lots of experts think it 
does vastly more harm than good -- that it doesn't "fight chaos" so 
much as "spread chaos."

So this week we saw a minister call for the closure of an inexpensive 
facility whose positive effects are supported by solid research. At 
the same time, the military called for new recruits to join a war on 
drugs that has never been properly researched and subjected to a 
cost-benefit analysis -- and that would surely fail miserably if it were.

That is Canadian drug policy summarized in two wretched images.

Dan Gardner writes Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom