IN THE NEWS

Letter from Al Arsenault                                                                                                           07/05/08

There is a strong movement afoot to legalize all drugs in our country. In regards to your article regarding our own Vancouver Inspector John McKAY slamming the over-emphasis of harm reduction over treatment and prevention I have only one word: Bravo!

I have considerably more experience in the Downtown Eastside than this good inspector has, as I walked those mean streets for many of my 27 years on the job as a career constable with an exemplary record. I retired just one year ago from the force and off the beat itself so I can solidly back up what Inspector McKAY has to say about the area that I now call the ‘Chemical Gulag’. Those touting the resounding success of the Needle Exchange Programs (NEP’s) and the Supervised Injection Sites (SIS’s) fail to back it up with the requisite stats. The rates of both HIV and Hep C were very low (less than 5% each) before this official needle nonsense began almost two decades ago. What are those rates now? A 30-40 % HIV rate and a saturation level of Hep C (95%). If that’s a success, I can only imagine what a failure would look like. How do the prevailing ‘harm reduction without treatment’ drug policies influence our youth and first-time users? How does this factor into this alleged ‘success’? 

It is as McKAY says, it was a “a failed social experiment” except that I would add “longest-running” as a qualifier to his typification, as I was walking the beat before the NEP was set up in 1989. I am an expert in the misery that drug abuse causes to people. These poor souls are living in a prison of poison and pain. Our current Mayor wants to legalize these drugs and give them to the addicts in an effort to appease the Crime Gods. This sacrifice, tantamount to the resultant loss of human potential, is staggering. His warnings to Ottawa are both accurate and timely.

I chuckle over Jasna JENNING’s reporting of a 600 % increase in the incidences of “observed” crack use and her naive suggestion that Ottawa will not end up like Vancouver. The “face of addiction” is growing more scabbed and hollow every day that we neglect to care for these people in a meaningful manner. Take a walk anywhere and anytime on my old beat and you can see the continual ‘crack fest’ that is taking place around the centralized services there, the suggested model for all ‘civil cities’. This festering sore of drug use, poverty, crime, homelessness, and mental illness is sickening, disheartening, and alarming.

How did this melting pot of problems get so bad? It is from trying to solve problems of permissiveness with more permissiveness. It is from a profound failure of those flouting the harm reduction policies in not being ‘judgmental’, thereby allowing the freefall of bodies through our society until their backs are lying on the cemetery sod: the hand that is offered to them contains a box of needles or a fresh crack pipe. It is from the failure of addicts to be held accountable for their own actions, chemically addled as they are not to request treatment over a place to fix. It is from having a municipal government that has totally bought into this harm reduction philosophy, over treatment and prevention initiatives, without having any accountability to its effectiveness. It is failing to see that the drug legalizers have hi-jacked the harm reduction initiatives, squandering much of the goodness it once had.

Donald McPERSON declared McKAY a “renegade” and he said that the inspector does not represent the Vancouver Police Department. The rank and file sees the truth behind what the stalwart McKAY says, I can assure you. For example, our own Canadian Police Association, representing thousands of police officers nation-wide, voted unanimously in favour of not supporting the SIS. This certainly trumps the few politically correct lackeys that McPHERSON has within the VPD. I wore the same moniker of “renegade” that McPHERSON had bestowed upon him, so McKAY is on the right track, for character assassination is meant to diminish the important spoken truth. We need to look at what is called ‘ground truth’ in the aerial photography business. It is the street level view of what is being passed off as a ‘success’ from high above. It is indeed good from afar but afar from good. McKAY should be supported in at least airing his views about this festering mess without bleeding hearts crying bloodshed. The bleak and painful truth that is witnessed by the frontline Police, Fire and Ambulance attendants should serve as a caveat to those thinking that prohibition is the real root cause of all the problems associated with drug abuse.

As for McKAY’s “child-like fantasy” that people will stop using drugs, McPHERSON’s motives for saying such tripe are very apparent and twisted as to suit his own needs. Let McPHERSON fret over the security of his own cushy job and give the man on the street a voice as he or she wades daily through a sea of despair that harm reduction has wrought.

The solution to the drug problem lies in treatment. We must make treatment more attractive than using. When done properly, treatment reclaims many lives to all of our benefit.  It is time to hear from these people. It is not the dirty needle or the unsafe crack pipe that is problematic- it is the primary relationship between the addict and the drug that needs to be addressed. Simply stated, the addicts need the ‘cure’ and not the poison. We all know of drug tragedy stories. Where are the drug success stories?

Our youth need prevention tools to make safe and healthy choices. Decent prevention work is difficult to achieve in the shadow of harm reduction and all that the ‘junkie industry’ promotes. Just ask any addict if they set out to be a junkie and ask them, knowing what they know now, would they have ever turned to drugs in the first place. The answer is of course “no”. We do need the stick of enforcement to keep the dealers at bay and to show youth in particular that drug use is not a just a ‘lifestyle choice’: it is unhealthy, unsafe, unproductive, and that is why it is illegal, not because it is a fun personal choice. These kinds of common sense strategies are plain hard work but Sweden exemplifies that it can be done. We can do it too if we stand up and say “no” to the legalization components within harm reduction.

The fix is in to legalize drugs and if this is left unchecked, Skid Road will be coming to a neighbourhood near you.

Al Arsenault

President

Odd Squad Productions Society

[email protected]

www.oddsquad.com

cell: 604-788-7051