A COP SCRUTINIZES HARM REDUCTION

John McKay, a long serving Vancouver Police Officer, wrote this analysis in 2005:

THE FOUR PILLARS RE-EXAMINED

The Four Pillars approach to drug addiction (prevention, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction) is a social experiment developed in Vancouver, promoted worldwide by our former mayor, and hailed as a great success by its proponents. As a police officer working on the Downtown Eastside of this city for the past 4 years, I have had the opportunity to observe this strategy first hand and see beyond the theoretical Four Pillars model to the actual results of its implementation.

The Downtown Eastside, one of Canada’s economically disadvantaged neighbourhoods, is a 12 block area including a population afflicted with unusually high rates of drug addiction and mental illness. There are 130 social service agencies concentrated in this relatively small section of Vancouver which also has a disproportionate share of the city’s social and assisted housing complexes. Among the services available to drug using residents are free distribution of needles (more than 3 million are provided to addicts annually), drug cooking kits, and North America’s first safe injection site.

The philosophy underlying the current situation in the Downtown Eastside is, in theory, the “Four Pillars”. In practice however, the Harm Reduction pillar has been embraced and supported to a far greater degree than the Treatment, Prevention and Enforcement components of the strategy. It is interesting to note that harm reduction is the least expensive pillar to fund and the most supportive of drug use. Harm reduction measures enable drug use and the implementation of this ‘pillar’ through multiple initiatives has given Vancouver’s addicts a sense of entitlement.

The aim of Vancouver’s Safe Injection Site is to provide addicts with a safe place to use drugs where there is access to immediate medical attention if they overdose. In fact, the police officers who work in the DTES 24/7 have observed that most street drug use takes place in alleys just a short walk away from the SIS.

Unlimited free needle distribution is intended to reduce the spread of HIV and other diseases. The unintended consequences of this harm reduction initiative are the thousands of uncapped used syringes that addicts discard in parks and on neighbourhood streets. Because there is no longer a 1 for 1 exchange, users have no motivation to return the needles for proper disposal. Harm reduction for one group causes harm promotion for the rest of our city’s residents. The drugs injected in the SIS are usually paid for by the criminal activities of addicts who are responsible for most of the property crime plaguing Vancouver’s residents and visitors.

Many of the agencies promoting harm reduction are run by earnest, well-intentioned individuals whose objective is to keep addicts alive until they get treatment. Although this is an admirable goal, many harm reduction initiatives damage rather than help the addicts they target. Harm reduction on its own not only can’t help addicts get out of the pit of addiction, it actually digs the pit deeper and wider. On balance, many aspects of harm reduction can actually harm both addicts and non-using members of our communities.

To get a clear focus on the Four Pillar strategy we need to look at it from a broader perspective and examine how such an approach would be applied to illegal activities other than drugs. Effective existing strategies to deal with many criminal activities include prevention, treatment and enforcement. Harm reduction is usually one element included in all of these 3 “pillars.” It is illuminating to overlay the Four Pillar template on non-drug related crimes and observe the role of prevention, treatment and enforcement. This exercise reveals the flawed logic on which our City’s embrace of harm reduction is based.

If we place the Four Pillars template over other crimes, the roles of prevention, treatment and enforcement become clear. In the case of domestic violence [spousal assault], prevention includes violence recognition training and education about the availability of shelters, transition houses and legal protection. Enforcement policies for domestic assault exist in every province and treatment can be mandated for people convicted of spousal assault. These 3 pillars are already in place for domestic violence and all other crimes that society has deemed merit fines and imprisonment.

What then would be the 4th pillar? Harm reduction for domestic violence might mean that the batterer would wear boxing gloves when assaulting his spouse. Boxing gloves would, of course, reduce harm to the victim. Perhaps a ‘Safe Spousal Beating Site’ could provide immediate medical attention for the victims of domestic assault.

To extend the analogy we could consider harm reduction applied in a ‘safe impaired driving zone’ or a ‘safe burglary zone’. These concepts are ludicrous but the extension to a ‘safe rape site’, a ‘safe pedophilia site’ or a ‘safe assault site’ are as chilling as they are inconceivable. The answers to these offenses are Prevention, Enforcement, and Treatment. Harm reduction as a tool in these cases simply does not work. Nor is it a panacea for Vancouver’s drug problems. `

It is my belief that the 4 Pillars approach has placed the cart before the horse. There is no doubt that for effective solutions we must focus on prevention, treatment and enforcement. Harm reduction cannot stand alone. It is already included in the first 3 pillars and its value depends on its connection to prevention, enforcement or treatment. Those elements of harm reduction that are not congruent with prevention, treatment and enforcement should be seen for what they are: pro-drug initiatives which will lead to legalization. If successful, these initiatives will be detrimental to a safe and secure society. As a police officer, I have offered this perspective on the Four Pillars Approach so that citizens and their elected leaders can include it when they are considering the effects of drug addiction on our communities.

Salmon Janet Evening

I strolled along Robson St. Today, past the Art Gallery, one of our few period architectural treasures. I gazed on the former skating rink, where the Premier plans to put his giant clam shell.

No doubt, when Premier Clambell produced this pearl of an idea, he was eating shellfish in a restaurant and it suddenly popped out, to the rapturous applause of his ever-applauding, 30 something entourage. One of them perhaps wiped the oyster drool from his chin and put the napkin on Ebay.

But Robson St. is no place for the Clambell shell. It's like hanging furry dice from the mirror of a Bentley.

It's a dumb bell idea.

David Berner on Vancouver's Misguided Drug Policy (Part 1)

What follows below are 4 videos, each running about 9 or 10 minutes. Together, they constitute a speech I gave last week to the Rotary Club, Arbutus branch. This is a speech I have now given to many similar groups.

I cannot thank enough our friend, Robert Werner, who so diligently recorded this event and transferred it to YouTube and DVD.

Soon, these videos will all be avalable as well under the "Addictions Expert" section of www.davidberner.com.

David Berner on Vancouver's Misguided Drug Policy (Part 2)

David Berner on Vancouver's Misguided Drug Policy (Part 3)

David Berner on Vancouver's Misguided Drug Policy (Part 4)

Shocker - Your New Energy Saving Light Bulb will Cost More

Our electricity, in spite of winter storms and blackouts, is abundant and relatively cheap.

But learning that ordinary households are to pay more while corporations have practically been gifted the resource is a bit much.

Singh in Sanctuary

The most tiresome tale of Laibar Singh and his famous deportation order is one of social, political and cultural blackmail.

Hiding an illegal immigrant in a house of worship to claim sanctuary and blocking the road and door are detestable acts.

A man leaves his 5 children in another country and lies his way into ours. When discovered, he is ordered by our soveriegn nation to return to his place of origin.

The fact that he caught a cold or had a heart attack is moot.

The Sikh community who are rallying behind this man might be better served if they rallied behind someone who honors both them and Canada.

Wrong horse, wrong time, wrong fight.

Alex Tsakumis on Carole & Sam in Today's 24 Hours

WHAT NOW?

By Alex Tsakumis'

Rebel With A Clause'

In the aftermath of Carole Taylor's announcement that she will not run for Mayor of Vancouver exists the most compelling evidence that Sam Sullivan isn't simply in deep, dark trouble.There has never been a greater collective deflation of spirit than when Ms. Taylor said that she'll pursue other matters. The one person who would have been 'the natural' at doing the job that has been desecrated further since Larry trotted off to the luxury of the Red Chamber, will not be the one to polish Vancouver's badly tarnished star. Instead, Ms. Taylor will blend her time between familial bliss and corporate challenge.Consequently, Sam Sullivan would do well to look skyward (or is that downward?) and thank whatever or whomever it is that he believes in this week, because had Ms. Taylor run, he and his cabal of resume-advancement lapdogs and yesteryear has-beens would have all been out of work A Taylor run would have certainly helped a couple of Tory operatives working out of the local minister's regional office with their (tax-paid) time management (read: juggling) of federal duties and shilling for Sammy. Then again, every single major position either of the Mayor's personal campaign or that of the NPA is occupied by a prominent member of the Conservative Party. Two of three of his campaign co-chairs are simply window dressing: Mr. Sullivan shamelessly panders to the Asian Community and the meandering 'green movement'. The third co-chair, of course, is, you guessed correctly, another prominent Conservative. Liberals have bolted, en masse, from the NPA bailiwick for the less stormy climes of Vision Vancouver, and rightly so.The viciousness, with which some of the Mayor's local Tory pals were referring to Ms. Taylor in the last month, is surely a contributor to her abrupt withdrawal, too. I received one of those calls myself over the holidays. “Alex, we've got so much s-t on your girlfriend … she's the worst Chair the CBC ever had” (Note to reader: I've never dated Ms. Taylor). Besides, alleging that Carole Taylor was a lousy CBC Chair, is akin to referring to Jesus Christ as a failed carpenter.The Mayor's people know how bad his fortunes are and they will stop at almost nothing to get him re-elected, including tearing someone down - personally. I witnessed this last election, first-hand. The political muskets, loaded with immaterial personal tales about Jim Green, were at the ready. It was sickening.Is it any wonder why Ms. Taylor seemed so willing to save us three weeks ago and now seems repulsed, as we are, by the politics of division and nastiness that the Mayor's team lives for?We could once disagree with one another, politically, without being disagreeable. This notion is what Mr. Sullivan has torn from the heart of this city.Ergo, leaving Vancouverites with a sizable problem: having made abundantly clear how much they would abhor another three years of Sullivan nothingness, what now?

Justice Wallace Craig on North Shore Policing

TIME TO DECIDE ON POLICING
January 9, 2007
MAKE 2008 a year in which you have your say on the thorny issue of North Shore policing.
Let’s get our three mayors and their fellow councillors out of the wallow of patchwork policing before the municipal elections this autumn.
Before summer days are upon us we must arm-twist municipal incumbents and aspirants alike into declaring whether they will create a civilian constabulary to police the North Shore. And while we’re doing that, our local MLA’s should stand and be counted on the issue.
We need to ferret out the standpoint of each candidate and make sure it is not just a parroting of opinions of senior bureaucrats or the supposed wisdom of outside experts.
Voting is not enough!
With this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we can produce a collective and democratic decision on policing. In this year you have an opportunity to familiarize yourselves with RCMP paramilitary policing and compare it with local civilian policing. Use shrewd common sense, make your mind up and tell candidates what kind of policing your prefer. If they are uninterested or fail to respond, then go at them with the intensity of a sheep-herding border collie.
We British Columbians, living out our lives in the City and District of North Vancouver, are entitled to be served by an independent North Shore police department in which every constable is our employee and subject to the provincial Police Act.
Beyond that it is time to end the decades-old game of make-believe that “E” division of the RCMP is an actual and controllable British Columbia Provincial Police force.
The British North America Act requires that Administration of Justice be carried out by provincial governments. Administration of Justice includes policing. Yet on a day in 1950 political expediency trumped constitutionality as our provincial government handed over provincial policing to an Ottawa controlled division of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
This constitutional impropriety is still with us. If the overall contract with “E” division of the RCMP is renewed in 2012 for another 20 years it will be more than deceitful and misleading, it will be a pernicious act of ministerial misfeasance.
The past year will not slip quietly away. It was a time of intense exposure of outrageous misadventures and weaknesses in our once legendary national police force, now blundering and top-heavy with bureaucrats in uniform. A musty old paramilitary police force so institutionalized that it has been judged incapable of producing a commissioner from within its highest ranks and is now actually saddled with a civil-servant commissioner. Yet at street level in the City and District of North Vancouver, dedicated RCMP constables go about performing their duties with abilities and skills equal to constables employed by the District of West Vancouver.
A North Shore decision to create a civilian police department will certainly reverberate in other urban communities and trigger the implementation of other civilian police departments. That may force our provincial government to end contracting-out of provincial policing and by 2012 to bring back a British Columbia provincial police force to provide rural policing.
I believe that the decision over policing on the North Shore has ramifications beyond our little hillside. It will catch the attention of the federal government and may well cause the minister in charge of the RCMP to withdraw the force from engagement in urban policing and dedicate it to a less visible role enforcing federal laws.
But for us on the hillside it is a grass-roots opportunity to bring change. You can participate in making a decision on a black and white choice: to continue with patchwork policing; or be gutsy and go with one police force from Deep Cove to Horseshoe Bay, one chief constable, a minimal command structure, all officers working out of the police station at 14th Street and St. Georges Avenue in the City of North Vancouver, all of them bound to comply with the provincial Police Act and its complaint process and the governing presence of a North Shore police board.
This is my eighth column on policing. All of them are posted on my website http://www.realjustice.ca/. During the coming months I will write occasionally about police boards, the Justice Institute of British Columbia, the complaint process, and particularly on the cost of policing the North Shore. Contact Judicial Gadfly at wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca or by posting your comment directly on the Writer’s Corner of http://www.realjustice.ca/. This column was published January 9, 2007 by the North Shore News.

TAX THIS!

Carole Taylor may or may not add a carbon tax at our gas pumps in her upcoming budget, but this is a very bad idea for at least two reasons.

First, we are already overwhelmed by the high cost of fuel. One more tax will cause apoplexy or maybe a needed revolt.

Second, if the manufacturers and dealers insist on continuing to put SUVs on the road, how will a tax at the pump change anything? You think SUV owners will care about paying a bit more for their polluting monstrosities?

I live but a block away from Our Lady of Perpetual SUVs, a lovely parochial school that is visited 4 times a day by cavalcades of Exploders and other hulking tanks, each driven by a tiny lady, each transporting a tiny child.

A friend has recently ditched his late model station wagon for a Smart Car.

We need more smart cars, more smart people, more smart legislators.

Homelessness Revisited

Possibly one of the best and most powerful pieces on the subject of the homeless ever presented in the Sun appeared this morning.

It is written Dr. Michael Goodwin.

What becomes clear by the end of this editorial is that, in spite of all the flag-waving by the mayor and premier about what they claim to be doing, nobody is truly building new and appropriate low-cost housing for the indigent. The city announcements in recent months about the 12 or so sites they are refurbishing are all about existing stock being reconfigured.

The homeless are OUR problem, and until we demand of our elected politicians that they spend some money - and that includes the Federal government and their basic abandonment of the role of CMHC - we will be no furhter ahead.

The Co$t of $triving for Perfection

Some rare good news!

Congratulations to Tom Lee Music, the Vancouver Sun and others who are putting their purses into a new program to support elite athletes here in BC.

The program is called Growing Champions and it will offer $5,000/year for 3 years to dedicated and skilled athletes in training.

Now, $5,000 a year is not nearly enough to cover the endless costs to a young athlete and his or her family, but it's a welcome help and a great start.

This has been a very long time coming and we can only hope that more and more businesses will sign on.

Hillary as Evita

Don't cry me for me, Barak Obama....la la la...


For the ultimate re-hash of Senator Clinton's 2 and a half teary moments, you must read Maureen Dowd in this morning's NY Times.





It's a riot and spot on.

Backstage at "The Phantom of the Opera"

Elizabeth James Finds Us Lost in the Woods

David:

Awake far too early, as usual, I turned to TV Channel 111 locally, mostly for the background music. But then this brilliant news item scrolled by --

"The Federal Government appears poised to introduce programs to provide relief to Canada's struggling forest industry, which has been hit by a double whammy - the rising value of the Canadian dollar and the depressed housing economy in the United States." Nary a peep about the criminally-ignored, decade-plus, devastation of the interior forests of this province, soon to sweep though the Central and South Okanagan tourist mecca.

Where is BC on the map? It's almost as though we don't exist out here.

I thought the Conservative power base was in Western Canada. And where's our own government - besides scribbling about green carbon taxes on the Maui beach, that is?

A good friend of mine - a consultant in the industry - remarked last summer, "Elizabeth, what you have to realize is that forestry in British Columbia is no longer about trees; it's about real estate."

That was confirmed a few weeks ago, of course, by the sell-off of lands in a coastal forestry licence to private interests in Sooke - all given the OK by BC's Minister of Forests.

And where are the people? Heads in the sand, making pots of dough - at ten bucks an hour - in the "booming (paper) economy" of the Best Place on Earth.

And where will they be when our resource-based economy goes bust? Movin' on, Brother; movin' on out.

Elizabeth

A New Mayor, Please

Carole Taylor is right to step away from the run to the Mayor's chair, but it is truly our loss.

If she ran, she would have virtually guaranteed an end to the Nutty Mayor's ugly, divisive and do-nothing reign.

Now, we must hope and pray that SOMEONE will emerge as Contendah.

Sullivan is surrounded by Federal Conservative Party hacks who devote most of their tax-payer time to re-electing this sham and disaster. He also has a coterie of blind loyalists who worship his every utterance.

Yesterday's shameful front-page Cinderella story of his "romantic wedding proposal in Venice," no less, was so transparently a PR ploy that all one could do was gasp at the callousness.

Cope and Vision have played themselves out of the sandbox.

It will take someone new with a new bank account to wrest the chair away from this public menace.

Quote of the Day

David "Cross the Floor" Emerson is in Beijing firing on all cylinders.

To hell with human rights - on with the Games!

"There are other ways of dealing with the various issues on human rights and other connected issues without sullying the virtues of Olympic events and competitions."

So, on top of not wanting to talk about "uncomfortable" realities, we should censor dissent?

We are surrounded by real democrats, aren't we?

Nutty Mayor Steals From Park Board Budget

Marvelous editorial piece by Vancouver Park Board commissioner, Loretta Woodcock (What a great name for a Park Board person!), in today's Sun.

She correctly blames the Nutty mayor for spending money on nothing and then asking the Park Board to cut their own spending.

A must read.

Paving Over Paradise, Chapter 986,424

In response to my Sunday Post, "The Gulag Known as Langley," came this excellent and spooky tale about North Vancouver.

Langley isn't the only Gulag around.

Only here, District of North Vancouver Management Staff run the show.

In the case across the pond, we have another wetland threatened by too much habitat fragmentation and degradation from recreational development for mountain bike activities.

Read "amusement park" development with structures, stunts and "roller coaster" trails rock armoured to death like a roman road.

On the Mountain View wetland, habitat to a species at risk, Red-legged frog, I spoke with Parks management and staff, who I walked with and talked with about the Alpine Recreational Trails Plan in Mtn View Park wetlands and environs inside the Lynn Valley neighbourhood catchment area. There is no PLAN -- only an Alpine trails CONCEPT. This means if DNV Council supports staff recommendations, then they have effectively given Staff and the NSMBA a carte blanche on trails, etc.

Parks management and staff could give me no assurance the trails slated for closure/decommissioning would in fact be closed. But there was an air of arrogance as those two continued to show me how many more trails would be rock armoured and heavily modified for mountain bike use.

Then the clincher.

There will be another entry exit for mountain bikes less than 50 feet away from the entry exit already in place at Mtn. View Park.

By the way, it is 2008 - The Year of the Frog. Does that matter to Staff and Council? Noooo. It is all about placating the whiny mountain bikers. Community apathy aside, I feel like I am fighting a lost cause.And my so-called "allies" on Council are non-committal to me --- what else is new?

Do you think Council will have the patience to vote on each separate trail? Doubtful, and this is what Parks management and the NSMBA are counting on. There is no management on the Alpine areas -- except to kow tow to the NSMBA's whining. The public has been taken for a literal ride in the woods with this public process and "plan", including the formation of a benign "reference" group who have had democracy taken away from them. It is all crying sham! And no outcry?

The people will get the forests they deserve. I am not holding my breath on this one. I just feel sorry that later generations will become further alienated from nature.