PM'S ANTI-DRUG PLAN PANNED BY
COALITION 
Daily Gleaner, CN
06, Oct,
2007
VANCOUVER
- Critics of the Conservative government's new anti-drug plan are calling
it everything from naive to politically opportunistic and a threat to the
civil liberties of Canadians.
A coalition of Vancouver health and
social groups says prison terms and attempts to scare users straight won't
solve Canada's illegal drug problem.
"You just can't incarcerate
your way out of this," former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, a member of the
Beyond Prohibition Coalition, said Friday. "The United States locks
down 2.3-million people every night."
Owen, an architect of
Vancouver's drug safe-injection site, told a news conference the Tory
government's adoption of policies similar to the failed war on drugs in
the United States is "uninformed."
Prime Minister Stephen Harper,
who has been skeptical of the safe-injection site's claimed harm-reduction
benefits, promised Thursday to put more drug dealers behind bars and help
drug users kick their habits in the $64-million anti-drug plan.
Another coalition member, former B.C. provincial court judge
Jerry Paradis, said illegal drugs have been used as a political gimmick by
prime ministers for decades.
"Stephen Harper has just discovered
the political usefulness of drugs finally and that all of this is
posturing leading up to a federal election," said Paradis.
The
issue is personal for drug addict Dean Wilson, who showed up late and
dishevelled to speak to the media.
He said he's still trying to
comprehend what the government is attempting to do.
"Dead people
don't detox. We've got to keep them alive long enough to make the
right decision," he said.
"If he came down here and saw what was
going on, I think he would change his mind," Wilson said, pointing out the
window to Vancouver's gritty Downtown Eastside, Ground Zero of the West
Coast's drug problem.
Harper noted during his announcement that
two-thirds of the funding will go to prevention and treatment for addicts
and to promotional campaigns to keep people away from drugs.
The
coalition said harm reduction should be the centre of a government
strategy that includes not only treatment but social housing and
employment.
On the eve of Harper's announcement, the government
announced another extension of the safe-injection site's special Health
Canada licence to operate, which expires at the end of the year.
Supporters had been worried Ottawa would not renew it.
Ann
Livingston from the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users said the
government needs to stop criminalizing drug users.
"Unless
Canadians move forward and change our drug policy and our drugs laws, I
think that we're going to be feeling like we're trying to move a mountain
with a teaspoon," she said
Paradis, a provincial judge for 28
years, agreed crime and drugs can be related but prohibition and not the
drugs themselves are at the root of the crime.
"I've never had a
case of a kid who smoked too much marijuana
taking a pickaxe to somebody else's head at a party," he said referring to
what's believed to have been an alcohol-fuelled fight at a Calgary house
party where a 17-year-old man was killed last weekend.
The
B.C. Civil Liberties Association opposes the new approach for
mandatory minimum sentences for serious drug crimes, calling it a
"significant threat to civil liberties."
In a news release, the
association said the same approach in the United States resulted in unjust
prison sentences while it failed to reduce the supply or demand for
drugs.
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