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Vancouver's Downtown Eastside a cautionary tale for Ottawa, officer says; Harm-reduction programs wrong way to go, inspector warns

Ottawa's commitment to helping drug addicts could put the city on a perilous path to creating a version of Vancouver's notorious Downtown Eastside, a senior Vancouver police officer who spent five years policing the infamous strip warns.

After twice touring the city's downtown core with Ottawa police officers and seeing first-hand the capital's growing crack cocaine problem, Insp. John Mc-Kay says he sees signs of Ottawa's becoming a haven for open drug abuse, street prostitution and crime if the city's drug strategy doesn't balance harm-reduction initiatives -- like the controversial crack-pipe program -- with strong enforcement, treatment and prevention.

Insp. McKay's warning comes one month before Ottawa's community and protective services committee is expected to be presented with a comprehensive and detailed strategy to combat drug abuse, prepared by a group of more than 60 agencies known as the Community Network.

The first phase of the plan, based on what is known as a "four pillars" approach, was unanimously approved by city council last year.

Insp. McKay recently told a committee working on the city's Integrated Drugs and Addictions Strategy that, in the opinion of frontline officers, Vancouver's "four pillars" approach was "a failed social experiment" that put too much emphasis on one pillar -- harm reduction -- and didn't pay enough attention to the other three pillars -- treatment, enforcement and prevention.

"You do not want to go down this road because you will ruin this city," says Insp. McKay, who spent five years as the inspector in charge of the Downtown Eastside and is now the executive officer to Vancouver police Chief Jamie Graham.

But Alfred Cormier, who co-chairs the Community Network's issues and planning committee and is a program consultant with the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, says there are important differences between Ottawa and Vancouver.

While Ottawa is second only to Vancouver for the highest rates of HIV and hepatitis C among injection-drug users, there are no plans to set up controversial safe-injection sites in the capital, Mr. Cormier said.

He says Ottawa has also added a fifth "pillar" to the strategy -- an integrated and co-ordinated effort to put its plan into action.

"As long as we are measuring whether we are able to make a difference, that might be the insurance to prevent us from getting into a situation that degenerates into an environment like the Vancouver Downtown Eastside," he says. "If we are not making progress, then we change course."

George Langill, one of the co-chairs of the Community Network, adds the drug strategy they plan on proposing is "more of a made-in-Ottawa solution than anything else that has already been done."

Mr. Langill, who spent 30 years as chief executive at what was then the Royal Ottawa Hospital before retiring in 2005, said the Ottawa strategy will offer solutions unique to the situation in the capital region, paying special attention to existing social services in Ottawa, language and cultural issues and the areas to which drug-addicted people are migrating.

He believes there is no reason to move away from an integrated approach that includes harm-reduction initiatives designed to reduce the spread of diseases through drug-addicted populations.

But Insp. McKay believes the warning signs of a future problem -- abandoned and boarded up buildings, open crack use, an increasing population of drug users, some of whom are mentally ill, and social services that are all in close proximity -- are already evident, and will only get worse.

Next, he says, the city could see drug "tourists" who flock to the city because they know their hits are readily available here, and the rise of the "survival sex trade," as women addicted to crack cocaine turn to street prostitution to pay for their habit.

"Harm reduction for drug addicts is harm production for everyone else," says Insp.

McKay, adding that harm-reduction measures like Ottawa's crack-pipe program are a "Band-Aid solution" that is a "cheap" way to avoid legitimate treatment and prevention.

Vancouver's drug policy coordinator, Don MacPherson, says Insp. McKay is a "renegade" and does not represent the Vancouver police, a force that has recently approved its own drug strategy that embraces harm reduction and the four-pillar approach.

According to Mr. MacPherson, Vancouver spends more than four times as much money on treatment and prevention than it does on harm reduction.

"Of the $26 million that goes into drug treatment a year in Vancouver, a total of $5 million goes into harm reduction, $3 million goes to prevention and the rest goes to drug treatment," he says.

"It's just the usual harm reduction attack that we get from some police," says Mr. MacPherson of Insp. McKay's position, adding that some officers have a "child-like fantasy" that people will stop using drugs.

Former Ottawa police Chief Vince Bevan was a vocal critic of the crack-pipe program, saying it encourages drug use and may even be illegal.

Frontline officers also disapprove of the program, saying it doesn't work because users disregard the parts of the crack-pipe kits meant to prevent the spread of disease and still share the dirty pipes.

Jasna Jennings, executive director of the Byward Market Business Improvement Area, reported a "visible increase" in the amount of open drug use in the downtown core.

"It's not like they are walking among the vendors smoking their crack pipes, but they are in public areas," she says, adding the BIA's street ambassadors reported more than a 600-per-cent increase in the number of incidents in which patrollers saw open drug use.

There were 131 incidents of open drug use observed in the summer of 2006 compared with 18 the year before, Ms. Jennings says. The majority of those incidents occurred on the Waller Street pedestrian mall.

Despite that, Ms. Jennings says she doesn't believe downtown Ottawa is in any danger of becoming the Downtown Eastside.

"That is a really extreme situation," she says. "The face of addiction is changing, and it is something everyone needs to acknowledge is there and do whatever they can to try and curb it, to stop it and halt its expansion."

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