Vancouver Courier
for September 30, 1998

Folks, this cocaine stuff is getting serious - real serious. And it is forcing me to re-think the question of drugs and law enforcement. And re-think as I will, I can't find an answer.

I've been all over the block on this one. Having originally supported, in the Legislature, the Heroin Treatment Act, I later as Health Minister disbanded it. Now I'm not sure I was right to support it in the first place or abandon it. Such is my current state of perplexity.

I argue back and forth on the question of why some forms of recreational drugs, alcohol and tobacco, are legal and others like heroin and marijuana are not. How can I tell my grandkids about the jolly times we used to have in the Georgia Pub, throwing back innumerable 10 cent glasses of beer, yet seriously admonish them against the perils of marijuana? I suppose there are a couple of answers - beer was legal (though we were not necessarily of legal age) and marijuana is worse for you.

I've argued that heroin addiction in itself is no worse than tobacco or alcohol were it not illegal thus so costly. Many a reformed heroin addict has told me that heroin is easier to beat than tobacco and can anyone really say, illegal market and its ramifications aside) that heroin causes more social problems than booze? The next logical step was to adopt the position that if you took the illegality away, the price of heroin would be affordable thus addicts wouldn't have to steal for their fixes. On paper that argument still makes sense but after personally looking at the British free heroin program of 20 years ago, I became convinced that it didn't really work.

But with all that wooly-headedness, past and current, in light of recent experience I've decided that this cocaine shooting puts illicit drugs onto an entirely different plateau. And that perhaps we no longer talk about alcohol and drug problems (I've never understood why alcohol is given separate billing) but separate them into two categories - those which kill quickly and spread disease and those which don't.

This year we'll lose about 400, mostly young, people in B.C. to heroin and cocaine overdoses with the shift very much to crystallized cocaine. Readily available at $10 a pop, it's relatively cheap even at 20 hits per session (if you think that's expensive, have you priced hockey tickets lately?) and it's a quick, effective, and highly addictive fix.

400! A 747 full every year! Not quite two Swissair disasters. Not all at once, I grant you, but damned near.

What the hell do we do about it?

Indifference? If these kids want to kill themselves, let 'em? Well, lest you think these kids come from some other neighbourhood, think again. They're from everywhere - East Vancouver, the West Side, the North Shore, White Rock ... everywhere. They're the same kids we put on "dry grads" for so they won't kill themselves in cars.

Throw them in jail as we did in the 60s? You can't do that - there aren't enough jails, the last place you need young people to go is prison and it won't work now any more than it did in the past.

Education? Of course. That will do good and the absence of it untold harm. But education will no more stop all younsgters doing coke than it will stop them all from making babies.

Get the pushers? Absolutely, but with one important caveat. The guy your kid buys the coke from is probably just supporting his own habit. Even if he isn't, he's small potatoes and will easily be replaced.

No, it's the big guys we must get. And the big bust by the RCMP last week is the way we have to go always combined with preventive measures, detox facilities and rehabilitation resources. (On the last, it makes no sense to detox if you simply sent the patient right back where he came from.)

If I'm right that cocaine has driven the drug problem, and the associated spread of HIV, to new, dizzying heights then we must deal with it head on. The entire drug front is too big and if we're not careful our resources on any part of it will be too thin. The target must be, foremost, cocaine.

For this, the police need public support.

They will get it provided they understand that this isn't a call to return to the days where kids were thrown in jail for smoking pot - especially since 30 years later many of them are still smoking it.

Overzealousness as we saw at the APEC Conference is what will kill the support the RCMP so badly need to fight what is a very new and ghastly drug problem which, combined with the HIV component, poses a health problem (for that's what it is) of staggering proportions.

Our whole community must get into this fight - the danger's too great for anything less.