A PROBLEM TOO BIG TO IGNORE

You can ignore the drug problem in downtown Vancouver, but you have to stay
away from downtown.

As the streets bustle with lunch-time traffic, just about every corner
features a heroin addict looking for a little spare change. And just a few
blocks east of the tourist epicentre -- the Pan Pacific, the cruise-ship
and sea-bus terminals -- is a no-man's land called the Downtown Eastside,
where even the most determined effort to avoid unpleasantness is bound to fail.

As you hurry to your car, you'll see a young man and woman huddled in the
doorway of a grey building with grimy windows. The woman watches the man
drive a hypodermic needle into his eye.

Or as you wait at the curb to pick up someone, you see a woman lying
against the building, her head back, her mouth open, a needle dangling out
of her arm. She looks dead but, somehow, you know not to get alarmed and
rush to help her. Somehow, you know to leave her alone.

It seems as if every dark corner features its own grisly tableau, and you
learn not to see, even if there's nowhere else to look.

But the drug crisis in Canada's tourist capital is so bad that the
cruise-ship operators can't ignore it. They supply their customers with
notices warning them not to stray from Gastown, its steam clock, funky
cafes and shops.

According to a Framework for Action, a 76-page manifesto more commonly
known as the Mayor's Plan, there are 12,000 injection drug users living in
Vancouver. The Needle Exchange, where addicts come to get clean needles
free, handed out nearly 3.3 million needles last year. That's right, 3.3
million!

It's almost as if we've come to accept human degradation as part of the
landscape, as immutable as the mountains.

Finally, however, we're trying to do something about it. There's the
Vancouver Agreement, a three-government effort to fight the problem and,
now, there's the Mayor's Plan, a multimillion-dollar vision that proposes a
radical departure from the traditional approach.

The plan advocates "harm reduction," and recommends that addicts be treated
with heroin, that safe injection sites be set up where addicts can go, out
of harm's way, to shoot up in peace.

Such proposals are, of course, wildly controversial. A group of Downtown
Eastside business owners and residents have come together in the Community
Alliance to specifically fight harm reduction, which, they argue, will
transfer the harm to the hard-working, tax-paying citizens of the Downtown
Eastside, ruin their businesses and jeopardize their safety.

It's hard not to have sympathy for these people, whose daily lives are like
a tour of Dante's Inferno, but something has to be done. The litany of woe
is intolerable: Hundreds die of overdoses; young girls are trapped into
prostitution; at least a quarter of the addicts are HIV positive. The
Downtown Eastside is a breeding ground for disease and crime.

Donald MacPherson, who wrote the Mayor's Plan, says there is plenty of
evidence for the success of harm-reduction programs in Germany and
Switzerland. A recent poll in Vancouver indicates that the public attitude
toward harm reduction is changing. Of the 300 people surveyed, 61 per cent
said they support the medical use of heroin and safe injection sites.

The Mayor's Plan is going through public hearings right now. There is a
sense of urgency in the air, a notion that this time we're really on the
verge of a solution, even if it means swallowing our compunctions about
giving addicts a free fix and a safe place to shoot up.

Yet people who work with the addicts are worried. They see harm reduction
as a showy distraction from the real need: more detox beds, long-term
treatment and counselling. They argue that addicts want to get clean, and
there is a very delicate window of opportunity once they gather up the
will. They need access to detox right at the crucial moment, not just on
Welfare Wednesday, the one day a month when everyone has enough money to
buy drugs, the one day you can count on a bed in detox.

They point out that Frankfurt has five times as many police on the streets
as Vancouver, that police force addicts to use safe injection sites and,
even then, more than one in three don't go to them. The very term "safe
injection site" is misleading, they say. No one is safe from bad drugs or
unusually potent drugs.

Still, the people on the front line think Mayor Philip Owen is a man of
good intentions, even if his plan is flawed and incomplete. It's just that
when you live with this misery every day, the truth is obvious: There is no
quick fix.