'THERE'S NO GOING BACK.'

Next week, if all goes according to plan, Vancouver mayor Philip Owen will
present a new drug plan. Not everyone will agree with what it says. Everyone
will agree that something has to be done.

You don't have to tell Susie and Rob Ruttan that the troubles of the
Downtown Eastside ripple outward, with the power to undo lives that are
seemingly safely far, far away.

Their intelligent son, when he was barely 15 years old, found it simple
enough to leave the loving, affluent Kerrisdale home tha Susie and Rob
offered him, found it as easy as asking for a bus transfer to visit the open
drug bazaar around Main and Hastings and, eventually, wind up smoking, then
injecting, heroin.

You don't have to convince Susie and Rob Ruttan -- she a former school
teacher, he a crown counsel -- that addiction is a health issue, a very
complex health issue, often joined to some other source of psychic pain deep
within the drug user.

Their son was "always a risk taker" they will tell you, and his disturbingly
wide mood swings have been diagnosed the result of a bipolar disorder. "In
between the extremes, he's a charming, funny, endearing guy to be with,"
says Rob Ruttan of his son, Susie nodding agreement. You don't have to tell
the Ruttans that the road to recovery for heroin addicts is long, uncertain
and fraught with relapses, and that while treatment options must reflect
this, in B.C. they do not.

When the Ruttans first discovered their son was using heroin, they scrambled
to find him long-term treatment, only to face a five-month-long waiting list
here in B.C. The months passed, his addiction deepened and, by the time he
reached the top of the list, he was deemed too severe to treat at all. The
province offered no program for him, period. By the time the Ruttans managed
to get their son into a Ontario program, they were dismayed to learn he had
already contracted Hepatitus C.

You don't have to prod the Ruttans to imagine for the Downtown Eastside and
the region a major shift in not only the treatment we provide drug users,
but how we deal with them on the streets and in the courts.

The Ruttans, who helped found a support group for parents of addicts called
From Grief to Action, are close students of the so-called "harm reduction"
strategies pioneered in Europe over the past decade. Harm reduction
approaches include a full range of treatment options, yes, but also health
services for users who don't want to quit, services that include widely
dispersed needle exchanges, rooms where addicts can safely inject, even
prescribed heroin and cocaine to hard-core addicts. It is the "war on drugs"
turned on its head.

Rob Ruttan, who as a crown counsel has prosecuted many a drug-related crime
against person and property, is especially impressed by lowered crime
statistics he reads about in Europe's harm-reduction zones. In such places,
police work to move drug users off the streets and into arms of health
workers rather than jailers. Rob finds plausible the "civil order" argument
made for this strategy, that methadone, heroin prescriptions and treatment
on demand pull more addicts out of the black market hustle for a fix, and
that leads to fewer break-ins and safer streets.

You don't have to remind the Ruttans that trying something like that here
would require deft political navigation through extremely stormy waters. In
March 1999, a drug and alcohol rehab house called Turning Point, designed to
serve nine men for up to seven months at a time, attempted to open its doors
in a quiet Richmond neighbourhood. This was greeted by 150 protesters and a
petition with 9,700 names demanding the centre be moved. Among the placards,
banners and signs, one asked "Where is justice? Where is democracy?" and
another, held by a little girl, said "Help! Help! I'm scared to play outside
now. Who will help me?" A continuously playing tape blared "Go home Turning
Point!"

As the protest reached its fourth week, Susie Ruttan and her two daughters
drove from Kerrisdale to Richmond to bring the Turning Point people a fruit
basket, a plant for their garden and a card with signatures declaring their
support. By the time that trip was made, the Ruttans had travelled,
emotionally and intellectually, a far distance, indeed.

City Hall's Big Drug Test

Of course there's little surprise that a child in trouble might push two
parents to rethink how society should work. What is surprising is that at
city hall, a place ruled by the most finely tuned and utterly pragmatic
political considerations, the mayor and others are tending to see through
the eyes of the Ruttans.

They, too, have been looking to Europe for inspiration, for some hopeful new
path for the Downtown Eastside, a neighborhood home to the region's central
heroin trade, some of Canada's worst poverty statistics and one of the
world's highest rates of HIV infection. They have sent emissaries to drug
conferences around the world, gradually knitting findings from experiments
in Holland, Great Britain, Germany and Switzerland into a proposed plan of
action tailored to fit, as best it can, the geographic, demographic and
political peculiarities of British Columbia.

Some important groundwork was laid in the past year with the announcement of
the so-called Vancouver Agreement, an understanding signed by federal,
provincial and city authorities that they'll all work together to tackle the
drug-fuelled woes of the Downtown Eastside. At bottom, that document is
rather vague in a feel-good, let's all cooperate way.

As early as this week, however, city hall will propose a far more specific
plan of action. It will recommend bold changes such as special courts of law
for drug users, broadly expanded outreach, health and treatment centres for
addicts, and firmer policing of the open sale and use of drugs on Downtown
Eastside streets. While the most hot-button European approaches --
prescribed heroin and cocaine, officially sanctioned safe injection rooms --
are said to be off the list so far, the very fact that the city is borrowing
so heavily from current European drug philosophy will no doubt keep those
options alive in the public debate.

And a public debate there will be, most certainly. The new document is bound
to be wrestled over by everyone from the Chinatown-based Community Alliance
members who vow to resist any more new addict services downtown, to Vandu,
an association of drug users whose mission is to fight on the same turf for
addicts' rights.

Small wonder that this soon to be released paper, authored by City Social
Planner Donald MacPherson, has suffered a difficult, delay-ridden gestation,
due to second looks and revisions by various city councillors and other
officials. Mayor Philip Owen is quick to admit that this is the most
nuanced, scrutinized and high stakes document to flow through city hall
channels in recent memory.

But the very fact that it is going to be floated to the public indicates
that Mayor Owen, for one, believes that the political culture of British
Columbia has evolved in the past half decade.

Take as benchmark the year 1994, when Vince Cain, a former chief coroner of
B.C., led a provincial inquiry into an epidemic of heroin overdose deaths.
The report he submitted offered six pages of recommendations, including more
money to house recovering addicts, needle exchange programs, job placement
plans for welfare recipients in rehab, and more detox and treatment
facilities for youth. Other major reports, some quite recent, have put forth
similar agendas. But Cain went further out on a limb when he proposed
imposing tougher 25-year sentences for drug traffickers, while
decriminalizing possession of hard and soft drugs.

"We have a serious problem," stated Cain, "and I submit that those directly
affected ought to be dealt with through a medical model, not a criminal
model, even to the point where I am suggesting the possibility of providing
heroin to seriously addicted people, in a para-medical model."

"That report was so hot it burnt the fingers of the NDP," Owen says now with
a laugh. "They quickly moved to get it into a closed cabinet."

Owen, however, liked what he read. At the time he'd been getting a lot of
pressure from tourism, hotel and other business leaders to clean up the
neighborhood where cruise-ship patrons mingle with locals cruising for sex
and drugs. What Owen liked about the Cain report was its panoramic view of
the problem and potential solutions.

Owen started talking it up, and suddenly the rather staid mayor from
Shaughnessy was branding himself a fresh thinker on drug policy.

Twice he's travelled to the Hoover Institute on Stanford University's campus
to hobnob with like-minded wonks, including George Schultz, former Secretary
of State for President Ronald Reagan. Three years ago, he and the Chief
Constable assembled dozens of agencies, businesses and other groups into
Vancouver's Coalition for Crime Prevention and Drug Treatment, which has
spawned a steady stream of public forum and the like.

In 1998 Owen welcomed an international symposium on crime prevention and
drug treatment here in Vancouver, and remembers European delegates shaking
their heads at our haphazard approach. "You mean you have a single needle
exchange, but no serious treatment for addicts?" they would say in
disbelief. "You mean you arrest users, but have nowhere to send them other
than jail or back on the street?"

Hearing that merely confirmed for him the breadth of what had to be tackled,
Owen says, and the need to have all levels of government committed and
working off the same page. That page, in the form of the Vancouver
Agreement, was signed in March of this year by all three levels of
government. That was important, Owen says, because any eventual major
overhaul of the legal framework, enforcement policies and health approaches
will have to come from Ottawa and Victoria. Translation: When the mayor of
Vancouver rolls out his plan of attack in the next few days, it will be less
a command, more a supplication. He may seem the leader by bringing forth a
blueprint, but much of the doing will be left to politicians in Victoria and
Ottawa.

How the Mayor will sell his vision

If you point out to the mayor that the Downtown Eastside is a long way from
Victoria and much father, still, from Ottawa, Owen turns almost fierce as he
vows to make this a national issue. How? By calling a meeting of mayors of
Canada 's major cities, and getting them to back his approach. "The whole
country has this (drug) problem! It's everywhere!" Owen fairly shouts. He
expects that message, delivered by all those mayors, to be impossible to
ignore at the federal level. "We'll say, 'Politically, you're going to wear
it if you don't join us!" Owen enthuses. "They will wear it!" And
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, he predicts, will become a kind of prototype
for what might be done from Edmonton to Winnipeg to Halifax

When it comes to pitching the plan here at home, the mayor's chief selling
point is its balance, an approach built upon, the mayor likes to say, four
pillars. Those pillars are: treatment (a full spectrum from detox to long
term); harm reduction (health services for those not quitting, and more
methadone); prevention (more education) and enforcement (police making a
bigger dent in the drug culture, drug courts steering users into treatment,
stiff penalties for dealing).

Being a careful political construct, those four pillars offer something for
everyone. If they work as envisioned, addicts who want to quit have an
easier time doing it, those who don't still stay healthier and civility and
safety return to the streets.

Unfortunately, while those four pillars may shimmer grandly when seem from
afar, upon close inspection certain architectural liabilities reveal
themselves. When real life political pressures are brought to bear, can they
stand without toppling into one another?

After all, moving drug addicts higher on any government's priority list has
never proved easy. And some of city hall's favourite European models are far
from a perfect match for Vancouver's realities. Take Frankfurt, a
four-pillar success story by most measures. Unlike Vancouver, however,
Frankfurt is run like a city state, whose mayor has sweeping powers over
health and social welfare, and a budget many times the size of our own.

Councillor Jennifer Clarke, who visited Frankfurt and Amsterdam last summer
on a brief fact-finding mission, now gives a crisply effective Powerpoint
presentation to interested groups explaining, in part, how impotent she and
her fellow councillors are compared to the governments in Europe that
brought about dramatic changes in their drug scenes.

Beyond jurisdictional disputes, there is the matter of what will fly with
the citizenry. When new approaches challenge long held values, not just
questions but alarms are bound to be raised.

And even the kinds of questions a sober technocrat might ask -- Does it make
sense to concentrate more drug related services in the Downtown Eastside or
disperse them? Should we proceed under the assumption that drug addiction is
caused by social injustice, or by unfortunate genes? Will the Charter of
Rights and Freedoms allow the sort of selective policing that goes hand in
hand with harm reduction methods in Europe? -- simply seem to invite more
and deeper inquiries.

Privately, off the record, a number of officials at city hall will murmur
their concerns about the risks the mayor is inviting with his ramped up
appeal to try new approaches in the Downtown Eastside.

After all, the mayor is finishing out his last term; he can walk away from
the political rubble if it plays out poorly. Recently, to appease members of
the Community Alliance who perceived him to be coddling addicts at the
expense of Chinatown's well-being, the mayor felt forced to back up and call
a 90-day moratorium on all new services for drug users in the Downtown
Eastside.

The same Community Alliance is talking about drafting candidates to run
against sitting city councillors who don't take a harder line against the
downtown drug culture. That's already an election issue between the riding's
incumbent MP, Libby Davies of the NDP, who is for more treatment and detox
facilities downtown, and her Liberal challenger, Mason Loh, who has said he
is not. And Jenny Kwan, the NDP MLA for the area who has shown an open mind
to harm reduction theories even if her government has been slow to react, is
pained to hear boos now when she enters some gatherings of Chinese-Canadian
business people.

And yet, a number of key politicians confided that the mayor's four-pillar
approach represents a way forward at a time when they could no longer afford
to do nothing new in the Downtown Eastside. That part of the city, they
said, had reached a new level of social decay, one that sends a message that
government has lost control of civil order on a major city's streets.

The proposals about to be floated, says the mayor, are "pivotal." They are
meant to be "a rallying point." Hammering together support for them will be
"treacherous with landmines, fraught with political problems," he admits,
and he knows he is out in front of his own council on some elements. Still,
he's eager to push ahead. "It's sink or swim time. There's no going back."

Perhaps most telling, politically, several councillors confided that if they
do not get behind the mayor's plan and help sell it, they fear being blamed
down the road for the overflowing of DES problems into other neighbourhoods.

They realize, along with Susie and Rob Ruttan, that the troubles of the
Downtown Eastside ripple outward with the power to undo lives seemingly
safely, far, far away. It's a point that, lately, Susie and Rob Ruttan have
been making a lot to those with power, and the patience to listen.

At a recent morning breakfast with downtown business leaders, Susie, with
Rob at her side, explained that her son has in the past been among those who
congregate in front of the Carnegie Centre at Main and Hastings to buy
heroin and, nearby, shoot up. She explained that the stigma of being there
in public, even suffering the occasional pepper spraying by police, was
worth it to her son because he felt safer there, knowing that if he
overdosed someone would be close by to call for help.

She said her son, when using, was terrified of dying in an alley with a
needle in his arm. And so she hoped for a day when police officers, when
they happened upon an person fixing in the street, might be able to
accompany the addict to a warm, clean, safe room made available by health
professionals for safe injection of heroin into one's bloodstream.

As a mother's wish for a son, it was an image both grisly and touching, and
it hung in the air as an invitation to everyone in the room to shake off
preconceptions about who is a Downtown Eastside addict, and what society
should afford that person.

Susie Ruttan had travelled a very far distance, emotionally and
intellectually, to be able to arrive at her answers. The question is how far
her fellow citizens, and her government, might now be willing to go.

From Grief to Action will hold a public meeting at 7:30 pm on December 1 at
St. Mary's Church on 37th Avenue at Larch Street. If you are coming, let
them know by email: grieftoaction@hotmail.com