WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Dr. Strangelove is calling his latest madness a "Treatment " program. He is raising private money and hiring various unemployed political sycophants to promote the doomed notion of giving addicts substitute pills.

He is phoning people at home in the evenings (Did he once have a job as a telemarketer for Telus or Mastercard?) to argue the divine inspiration of his new cause. The imbalance of the City's tax system, the growing impossibility of running a small business, the grid-lock and inefficiencies of our transit system, these are of little concern to S.S. He's got a bone and he's damn well gonna chew it. Stand back, Unbelievers.

You need only remind S.S. that the Conspiracy of Get Nowhere, known as the Four Pillars Coalition, trumpets around the world Harm Reduction, Treatment, Enforcement and Prevention and he will tell you that giving substitute drugs to drug addicts is a "Treatment Program."

What's in a name?

Call it treatment and therefore, it's treatment.

Of course, this pathetic, ill-conceived and headed-straight-for-the-wastebasket day dream is clearly a Harm Reduction strategy. The formula is rock solid, if you'll pardon the pun. We give, they take - harm is reduced. So goes the theory and the model. Watch: We give needles, they take - HIV is reduced. Nice theory; indications are the opposite. We give "safe" injection site, they take - shooting in the alley and stealing are reduced. Not.

So now we are to give addicts pills, they will take - no stealing. Dream on, S.S.

What is so comical, so tragic, so downright smelly is the arrogance, the lack of understanding of human nature, the desire to be held aloft as the Saviour of Vancouver. Not having the practical wisdom to understand that human progress is made in tiny steps - a little here, a little there - Dr. Strangelove (Look at the hair across the forehead. All he needs is a leather glove and a moustache.) believes he will make one grand sweeping gesture and Vancouver will become drug-free, crime-free, homeless-free, not-nice-free.

Make no mistake, Taxpayers, this is an obsession.

He calls meetings to order, spends three minutes on other business and then pontificates for half an hour on this silliness while the gathered stare in silent disbelief and embarrassment.

He openly tells people that he doesn't want the police involved in drug matters, that prevention programs don't work and that abstinence treatment is an expensive failure. In other words, he doesn't support the Four Pillars strategy at all. He wants only harm reduction and to sell it to the suckers he calls it treatment.

But that's the Way of the Emperor, isn't it? If I say it is so, then it is so.