ON ADDICTION, DISABILITY, AND CARNEGIE

As someone who has experienced addiction in the form of a protracted battle
with alcohol, I take strong exception to the remark by Coun. Sam Sullivan
in your April 19-26 issue [Straight Talk]: "You don't treat drug addicts by
curing them any more than you treat quadriplegics by making them walk.
You've got to help them manage their disability."

Not only is this a profound insult to quadriplegics and others who are
permanently disabled through no fault of their own, but also to the
countless drug addicts and alcoholics who have cured themselves by simply
quitting.

Sullivan's attitude points up the fundamental wrong-headedness of the
"harm-reduction" ethos, which absolves addicts by labelling them as victims
of a "disability" rather than recognizing addiction for what it is: a
choice for which the addict is responsible and which only the addict has
the ability to change.

Axel Biehl Vancouver

ON ADDICTION, DISABILITY, AND CARNEGIE

According to John Turvey, as well as the B.C. Human Rights Commission, drug
addiction is now to be regarded as a disability ["Carnegie Nailed With
Human-Rights Claim", April 12-19]. In other words, the addict has no more
choice at any point in the process of addiction than someone with a birth
defect, paraplegia, or schizophrenia. Please explain to a poor benighted
fool (who has flirted with addiction himself) who isn't able to make that
semantic leap-and be sure to spread the word among all the organizations
for the disabled.

Turvey, you are an ass-head. While 35,000 people a day worldwide starve to
death, you spend your energy trying to punish the last island of
civilization in the Downtown Eastside because they don't like having
junkies wandering in and out of the premises. Are you going to follow up on
this latest idiocy and suggest that nobody has the right to prevent anyone
from entering their homes or places of business? Leave the Carnegie alone.
It will close when they finally realize what a sad joke it has become: an
open-air mart and pissing wall for hypes that everyone else is terrified to
come near.

Michael Anderson

Vancouver

ON ADDICTION, DISABILITY, AND CARNEGIE

As a resident of the Downtown Eastside, I am becoming sick of the
pandering John Turvey and like-minded organizations are giving to the
junkies down here. I am sick of hearing "up", "down", "rock", "powder"
every time I leave my front door. I am sick of junkies using the back lanes
around my home as an open-air toilet/trick pad/shooting gallery. I am sick
of having friends' and neighbours' cars and homes broken into. I am sick of
the police brass caving in to special-interest groups, and I am sick of
people like Turvey abusing the human-rights legislation to further their
own agenda. If the people of B.C. knew the true scope of the financial
black hole that is harm reduction in the Downtown Eastside, I wonder what
they would say.

Dean McLean

Vancouver