BY ETHAN BARON, THE PROVINCEJUNE 3, 2009
There is no logic here.
Those are the words of Vancouver police Const. Brenda Burridge, talking about the
Downtown Eastside, her beat for the past six years.
Those five words say it all.
Where is the logic in thousands of people taking drugs that turn their lives into a miserable shuffle toward death?
Where is the logic in warehousing addicts in a neighbourhood where drugs are sold on every block?
Where is the logic in letting these addicts suck tens of millions of dollars a year out of our taxes and personal property while the government does virtually nothing to treat their
addictions?
Where is the logic in funding hundreds of social agencies whose primary purpose is supporting people who are locked into drug dependency?
On a recent visit to the Downtown Eastside, I spent two hours walking the beat with Burridge and Const. Claire Addey-Jibb, who spent a great deal of time searching addicts who were huddled in doorways and alleys, smoking and injecting crack and
cocaine and shooting heroin.
"Pull your pants up, gather your things up and go back to your room," Burridge told one man after he scattered his tiny amount of cocaine when caught preparing to inject it in a Blood Alley courtyard.
Here's some logic: Take these addicts and lock them up until they're clean.
Make them stop breaking into our cars, breaking into our homes. Make them stop visiting the emergency room dozens of times a year. Make them stop turning downtown Vancouver into a showcase of urban blight.
Make them become the people they could have been had they not become
drug addicts.
These people, in the grip of their addictions, cannot be responsible for making decisions for themselves.
They need to be forced into long-term drug treatment.
There are those who say that if an addict doesn't want to quit, rehabilitation will fail. But an addict who is busy feeding his addiction is not the person to decide whether he should get drug treatment. He needs to be locked up and detoxified, then put through a rehabilitation program whether he likes it or not. Once he's out of the grasp of the drugs, he'll be much more likely to see the benefits of rehab and become a willing participant.
Many addicts, as well, have mental illnesses that make them even less capable of making responsible decisions.
There are those who say we have no right to force people to get their addictions treated, that doing so violates their
civil rights.
Sorry. They lose their right to live as drug addicts when they start using our tax money and stealing our property to pay for their addicted lives. And we have a moral duty to step in and help people unable to cope with their problems, an imperative we are presently failing to achieve.
Lack of drug treatment stands as the primary reason for the social catastrophe in the Downtown Eastside, says Al Arsenault, a former Vancouver
police officer who worked close to 15 years on Vancouver's skid-row beat.
What Vancouver needs, says Arsenault, won't come cheap.
"The best treatment is the therapeutic-community model," says Arsenault. "That's the solution. Anything else -- throwing boxes of needles at somebody -- is not the answer. It just keeps people stuck where they are."
While the best examples of the therapeutic-community approach are found in Italy, where success rates top 70 per cent, the model can be applied in B.C. on a scale to fit the need, Arsenault says.
Short-term treatment of 30 to 90 days functions merely as detox, he says.
Addicts in treatment need to be housed under constant supervision, living under rules, sharing in chores and receiving training, education and coaching to prepare for re-integration into society, he says.
"You've got to have long-term treatment," Arsenault says. "It's more expensive [but] in the long term, it pays off."
Addiction-related costs from
policing, the courts,
health care, imprisonment and theft are massive, and the loss of productivity adds a huge social and economic cost, he says.
"The loss of human potential is staggering," says Arsenault, a strong advocate for forced rehabilitation who has seen addicts lose limbs to drug-related infections.
"We should say, 'Look, you're losing your arm. You're losing your life. You've lost your job. You've lost your family. So I'm putting you in treatment.'"
Understandably, many law-abiding, taxpaying citizens object to proposals to spend hundreds of millions of dollars setting up and running costly long-term treatment programs for junkies and crackheads.
But we're already spending almost a million dollars a day on the Downtown Eastside, much of the money going to support addicted lives, while doing little to end the problem. Non-profit social agencies provide important damage control, and save many lives, but the ultimate effect is to keep addicts warehoused in our ghetto, a black hole that sucks in the vulnerable and wrecks their lives.
Without court-imposed long-term addiction treatment, we're going to be spending that million dollars a day forever.
It would be far more cost-effective to invest in rehab programs and facilities that would actually pull people out of that hellhole and back into productive society.
It's easy to judge people who have chosen to destroy their own lives and live off the rest of us. But for those, like Arsenault, who have spent years getting to know the stories behind the addictions, humanity overcomes condemnation.
"I don't judge people for being drug addicts," says Arsenault, a driving force behind the Odd Squad educational films spotlighting addicts in the Downtown Eastside. "I was never date-raped when I was 14. I didn't see my father blow his head off with his shotgun.
"There's some really nice people under the scabs and sores and dirt."
At the Welcome Home Society in Surrey, where addicts spend an average of two years getting clean and preparing to become productive citizens, costs run to about $65 a day per resident, or just under $24,000 a year.
Data on success rates are not available because the facility has been operating on a small scale for four years in preparation for an expansion this summer, says director Len Jahn. But those who have graduated so far have done well, Jahn says.
"They're not drains on society," Jahn says. "They're gainfully employed. They're in good, healthy relationships."
To keep someone in a Canadian
prison costs nearly three times what it costs to treat an addict at Welcome Home, which is funded primarily by former United Furniture Warehouse owner John Volken.
It's a safe bet that each untreated addict is costing us way more than $24,000 a year in costs related to theft, health care, policing, welfare, jails and the court system.
And each untreated addict represents not only a personal failure, but the failure of our society to assist
human beings who cannot help themselves.
Having judges lock them up to clean them up would save us a pile of money, improve thousands of tortured lives and boost the economy.
There's logic in that.
Do you agree with Ethan Baron? Take our poll.
E-mail columnist Ethan Baron at ebaron@theprovince.com
For the latest on Operation Phoenix throughout our series, go to theprovince.com/news/operation-phoenix
91 per cent did not have a high-school diploma
40 per cent had completed Grade 9 or lower
18 per cent were homeless
26 per cent had been raised in foster care or residential schools
33 per cent had other family members in the sex trade
73 per cent began sex work before their 18th birthday
99 per cent had been victims of violence
73 per cent had been sexually abused as children
62 per cent had been sexually assaulted in the previous six months
98 per cent had experienced a "bad date," involving abuse, robbery or being dumped, in the previous six months
ebaron@theprovince.com
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