Published in Globe & Mail
When it comes to the "war on drugs," Canada's stance is not unlike its position on the war in Iraq: We're not the United States. Our government supports needle exchange, has recommended the legalization of marijuana, and is allowing the first trial use of prescription heroin in North America.
So when I moved from Toronto last year to work for Human Rights Watch in New York, the last thing I expected was to be reporting on Canada's abuse of drug users.
That was before April 7, which marked the beginning of the Vancouver police department's "citywide enforcement team," a three-month campaign to rid the streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside of drug traffickers and "restore order to a community in distress." In practice, this has meant a severe crackdown against drug users, not drug traffickers.
Visiting Vancouver recently, a colleague and I documented instances of excessive use of force, illegal search and seizure, and harassment of people never charged with dealing drugs. We saw an African Canadian man strip-searched in a busy street while he vomited from the police's pepper spray. We saw officers on horseback search the possessions of people who were never told why they'd been stopped.
Police crackdowns can drive drug users away from life-saving outreach services, increase overdose deaths, and even ignite turf wars among drug traffickers. That's why the city elected Mayor Larry Campbell, an ex-coroner who promised to fight illegal drug use with the "four pillars" of treatment, prevention, law enforcement, and harm reduction.
Harm reduction means things like needle exchange and "safe injection sites" -- places where drug users can inject under the supervision of trained medical personnel, rather than in the alleys of the Downtown Eastside. During the election, Mr. Campbell promised that a safe injection site would open by January. Today, frustrated activists are running an illegal site, while the proposed official site remains locked. Outside, police patrol the streets in triple the numbers of their ordinary force.
Mr. Campbell says it doesn't matter which pillar you start with, as long as you implement them all. But unleashing law enforcement without guaranteeing access to harm-reduction services can be fatal. Needle exchange is proven to reduce HIV infection among drug users without increasing drug use or drug-related crime.
Vancouver exchangers say that since the beginning of the police crackdown, they have distributed only a fraction of their usual number of sterile syringes. Fearing arrest, injectors stay away from exchange points; needles they do turn in have been reused so many times, the numbers have worn off.
Vancouver suffers from what may be North America's worst HIV/AIDS epidemic. As many as 40 per cent of the Downtown Eastside's 5,000 drug users are HIV-positive.
One police commander told me that AIDS activists should care more about the safety of the area's other residents. But AIDS activists pick up used syringes, find shelter for people with AIDS, and provide testing and counselling. They teach the public about infectious disease, patrol alleys to ensure people aren't overdosing, and exchange syringes in areas where no health-care worker would dare venture.
All of these services are being interrupted during the current police campaign. AIDS activists aren't telling the police not to do their job. They just want to do their own.
* Jonathan Cohen is author of Human Rights Watch's new report, Abusing the User: Police Misconduct, Harm Reduction and HIV/AIDS in Vancouver.
