Pubdate: Tue, 26 Jun 2012
Source: Ottawa Sun (CN ON)
Copyright: 2012 Canoe Limited Partnership
Contact:  http://www.ottawasun.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/329
Author: Anthony Furey

TIME FOR BLUNT TALK ON DRUG USE

I thought Ron Corbett's Monday column on drugs in the Byward Market
was a solid read. But Chief Charles Bordeleau was less taken with it.

In the column, Corbett explained that every day he walks through the
market he witnesses a drug deal. One day he was surprised to watch the
chief give a press conference on Project Firecracker - about drug
crackdowns - across the street from a live drug deal. The deal was
completed successfully. The buyer then leaned against the wall of the
Salvation Army - still in view of the police presser - and brought out
his crack pipe and started to inhale.

Corbett said "police investigations like Project Firecracker will
always fail." He also suggested Bordeleau "didn't give a damn" about
witnessing the crack pipe use.

The chief sent us a letter in response to Corbett's column, which is
printed in full in today's letters.

It began: "Ottawa Police Service is strongly aware of the complex
nature of addictions and its social drivers and the continuing need
for a community response to drugs and addiction in Ottawa." And
continued with: "Enforcement projects like Firecracker will always be
a part of the solution, but only a part. The true solution to these
complex problems will only come by working together." We need to cut
this "complex" talk. It doesn't help. It's what people say to get them
out of a tough spot. And this talk of "community responses" and
"coming together," while objectively sensible, looks eerily like the
enabling talk we've come to expect after decades of the ever-expanding
social service industry. It's disappointing to hear bureaucratic
non-speak from a police chief.

You see "complex" problems requiring "community responses" is actually
code for opening a certain type of social program that pushes the idea
we shouldn't believe in the moral agency of criminals and addicts,
that we shouldn't encourage personal responsibility and that we should
ask less of people and encourage them to believe they can't possibly
accomplish anything by themselves.

Decades of this have made it clear this is wrong. Here are some real
truths:

The social work industry teaches its young to view addicts as victims
(this is not my opinion, it's worded that way in the curriculum),
rather than seeks to empower them. This will never help people attain
independence. There is a lot of money in play in the social work
industry. People are interested in broadening it, not in effectively
solving the problems then winding the industry down.

If service providers amalgamated they could have a greater impact, but
there are too many people protecting their jobs as "executive
director" to do something as innovative as that.

The chief's letter is right to speak of Corbett's "surprising words".
But they're not surprising because they're rude. They're surprising
because they're a rude awakening. Because people don't talk like that
as much as they should.

These days "the powers that be" only talk in the language of polite
society, issuing reports and studies and occasionally hosting the
launch of yet another program. Meanwhile the rest of us get together
at the water-cooler or kitchen table and agree it's all a load of bunk.

And we don't come to these views out of ignorance. We come to them out
of years of first-hand knowledge. Just like Corbett did.
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MAP posted-by: Matt