I FEAR FOR B.C.'s FUTURE

Society's Aims Do Not Include Drug Trafficking
North Shore News: October 17, 2007

by Wallace Craig

LAST night I had a nightmare about British Columbia in 2020.
A demented British Columbia was fast becoming Canada's land of the behaviourally disordered; a promised land of 24-hour Insites and surreal achievements viewed through the looking glass of never-ending 'recreational' drug use; a land bereft of insight, common sense and ethics.
I am jolted awake and it dawns on me that British Columbia already is the de facto drug capital of Canada, with pre-eminence over all other provinces in a madcap move to drug legalization.
What drug legalizers don't even dare think about, and what we surely will have to endure, is the inevitability of Orwellian bureaucrats, and their medicine men, pitted against international traffickers and their contrivances and deceit. Our young people will be trapped between them.
In 2000, then-mayor Phillip Owen sold Vancouverites a bill of goods that would make a Howe Street promoter blush.
Like a biblical prophet he gave us the word. Our western land was to rise up on the certainty of the 'four pillars.' We were told that it was to be a transformational miracle; from a land beset by criminals to a land of the benign. The word alone, 'four pillars,' would make junkies, crackheads, methheads and potheads into quiet, self-indulgent, 'recreational' substance users.
On November 21, 2000, the Vancouver Sun made it a front page story headlined: "This is an international crisis."
Wrong. Vancouver was already an international disgrace. During Owen's watch, sixty-five women disappeared from the streets of Skid Road.
The Sun story, by reporter Frances Bula, said that "Mayor Philip Owen unveils today his sweeping plan for city's drug crisis."
"Safe-injection sites for drug users and providing free heroin for hard-core addicts on a trial basis are among the strategies the City of Vancouver is recommending in a new drug policy that is the first of its kind in North America.
"The plan, to be made public today, also includes drug courts that would put users into treatment instead of jail, special treatment beds for young people, day centres for drug users outside the Downtown Eastside, testing of street drugs to help prevent overdoses, and more police to target upper-level drug dealers. …
"The new plan, a copy of which was obtained by the Vancouver Sun, contains 24 recommendations … intended to emphasize the … strategy used in some European cities that is known as the four-pillar approach.
"Like European cities that pioneered it, Vancouver is also taking the position that it has to act even if others are not willing to yet. And, like them, it is also clearly shifting to a position that says drug addiction is a health issue, not a criminal issue.
"The plan does not commit the city to spending any money or to undertaking any immediate, controversial action. …All but two of the recommendations are labelled as the responsibility of …the federal and provincial governments, the Vancouver health board and the Vancouver Police Department. …
"Owen says that, while public reaction is important, the city will not agree to a final strategy that doesn't have all four pillars in place."
On November 16, 2002, Larry Campbell succeeded Owen in office and got there by being a loud voice in a campaign for so-called safe-injection sites.
Owen, Campbell and incumbent mayor Sam Sullivan are still campaigning for this cosmetic solution to Vancouver's festering sore of Skid Road.
Seven years have come and gone and all we have is rhetoric and one legal shooting gallery.
In the meantime we have lowered ourselves even deeper into the quagmire with a cheaper and more fashionable poison, excuse me, er drug, made locally: crystal methamphetamine.
On September 18, Owen popped up again on the op-ed page of the Sun under the banner of Continuing the 'war on drugs' is not helping the addicted.
Of all people, Owen should know by now that Canada has never had a war on drugs; the only war is that of the international traffickers in opiates who target the United States of America and local marijuana grow operators who, unidentifiable, slither unseen among us.
Similarly loose with facts, Owen fantasized that "Those who are addicted … did not choose a life of addiction, illness, crime and eventual early death. They are the victims and they require medical assistance."
"In 2001, Vancouver …adopted a four pillars approach (and) has five years of experience in implementing it. …we opened a supervised injection site in downtown Vancouver in 2003. The most recent study of the effects of this site shows that it reduces public disorder, refers users to addiction counselling, saves lives and improves health because it significantly reduces needle sharing."
Owen is in reverie and divorced from reality.
The hard truth is that Vancouver has opened one unsafe injection site and the other pillars are imaginary; and that includes enforcement of the existing federal criminal law.
Only a massive involvement by the federal government will rid Vancouver of the pestilence of illicit drug abuse.
When one becomes addicted, and a criminal, he no longer satisfies the criteria for citizenship: "a member of society especially as regards one's contribution to it."
Citizenship does not include a so-called God-given right to knowingly become addicted to a poison and then claim victimization.
Society is an association of persons united in a common moral and ethical aim, supported by firm laws. That aim does not include druggies and traffickers.
Our once proud Canadian society is constantly being brainwashed to accept never-ending addiction as a normal common feature.
We are being deluded into living according to a lowest common denominator.
It's time to be as tough as nails and stand together against these misfits.