Vancouver Courier
for November 11, 1998

Vancouver drugs and transit problems

When I was young lawyer I used to go down to the Vancouver police station to what were then known as police courts presided over by police magistrates who, when faced with a habitual offender, would thunder "get out of town within 48 hours." In other words, go away and bother policemen and judges in someone else’s community.

In those same times, 16 year old kids, in the words of a Poppy Family hit song, got "six months in jail for just smoking pot." That was the heavy hand of the law dealing with drugs. It won’t surprise you to learn that then, as today, kids went right on smoking pot.

Those who have just arrived in town might think that the Downtown Eastside has only recently become crime ridden. Well, it hasn’t. And I, for one, find it difficult to believe that hassling coke mainliners or throwing addicts in jail – including mandatory detox programs – is going to be any more effective than running people out of town and throwing kids in jail was 30 years ago.

But that’s the solution, we’re told. 40 new policemen will run pushers and addicts as far away as Burnaby, maybe even New Westminster. Enforcement, just like the 60s – get out of town or it’s the slammer, take your choice. It didn’t work then and it won’t work now because it doesn’t get to the root of the problem.

Interestingly, 30 years ago the City made another decision that has come back to haunt us – it decided against freeways in Vancouver. None of that concrete maze for us as we saw in Los Angeles and happening closer to home in Seattle. No sirree! Freeways were out.

How will people travel back and forth?

Let ‘em use buses, even though there aren’t enough and if it gets down to it, a bicycle is good for the heart and lungs, isn’t it?

Now Vancouver has a downtown Eastside that’s overrun by pushers and coke addicts and a transit system which is hopelessly inadequate, obscenely expensive, and for the most part going to the wrong places.

Surely most of the drug problem must be laid at the doorstep Vancouver City Hall. After all, isn’t Vancouver where it’s all happening?

No it isn’t. Vancouver may be where the "game" is played but the players come from all over.

Drug abuse, while a crime as is the stealing which must be done to sustain it, is basically, a health matter. While we’re all concerned about people using illicit drugs from a disciplinary point of view - when we sip our martinis and puff our cigars our concern is at its highest – the real problem is health and specifically AIDS which spreads far beyond the borders of the Downtown Eastside.

If it were simply a criminal law problem, why hasn’t it gone away? After all, the drugs are sold and used within a few hundred feet of the police station. But despite the hundreds of millions we pour into enforcement, the problem was never more serious than now. The police are no deterrent – any more than the noose deterred pickpockets at public hangings.

I have never been a big fan of the "if they can spend this much here they can afford etc" but surely this must be said: - if the Provincial government can afford up to $10 million dollars to get support for a Nisga’a Treaty which is going to pass whether we like it or not; if there’s enough money to afford forty policemen – at what cost? $2-3 million? – is there no serious money for housing and detox facilities, to say nothing of the education and counseling programs so necessary for the young? (Forget that specious argument that some police will simply be shifting responsibilities – to argue that would be to say that they are presently unnecessary.)

It’s understandable why Mayor Owen demands the extra police – he hasn’t the power or money to do what’s needed yet, especially in an election year, he must do something. Since the province has the real responsibility for health care, which drug abuse clearly is, and they prefer other sexier issues to spend our taxes on, enforcement is all the mayor has to fight with – and as he well knows, it’s not enough.

Philip Owen isn’t the only one in an election year. SkyTrain was, according to Glen Clark when in opposition, a terrible system. He’s not in opposition any more and, ever willing to move with the sands he himself has shifted, in quick order he’s turned the cost and decision making for transit over to the Greater Vancouver Transit Authority, fallen in love with SkyTrain, waived the environmental studies required for its expansion, then personally made the decision to extend it into mostly NDP constituencies.

Yes indeed. Greater Vancouver has a transit problem and a drug problem.

But its real problem is a provincial government ever eager to shift responsibility minus the resources necessary to meet it.