HARM REDUCTION IS CUNNING NONSENSE
November 7, 2007

by CJRB director retired judge Wallace Gilby Craig

PROPONENTS of the ideology of Harm Reduction - with their strident claims that reducing harm will bring drug addiction and related crime under control - are nothing more than self-serving propagandists.

A mantra-like repetitive misuse of the words "harm reduction" is intended to make truth out of their illusion that addiction is a manageable illness; a fool's paradise conjured up by Vancouver's health department and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority. It is cunning nonsense.

The use of the positive label 'harm reduction' is a sly attempt to insinuate merit and worth into unmanageable needle exchanges, unsafe injection sites and open-ended drug maintenance using methadone.
Wily harm-reduction activists are in a bureaucratic heaven as they glean data from a steady stream of addicts; the data ending up in career building ivory-tower research and evaluation. Whether our pitiful research specimens, human beings, avoid overdosing; or overdose and die - and sometimes be brought back to life only to continue to use drugs - is grist for this grisly statistics mill.

To merely change the setting in which a poison is absorbed or to substitute a synthetic poison in its place, is medically wrong. It is a misadventure of the most perilous kind. Canadian society has to confront the falsehood of harm reduction and all that accrues from it.

A decent and humane society must have significant influence on the self-indulgent few who engage in chronic ingestion of illicit drugs and crime. Law abiding Canadians must speak forcefully on the issue of illicit drugs. The welfare of our children and grandchildren is at stake.
English writer Victor S. Pritchett said "When I say society I mean more than people; I mean people bound together for an end."

Whatever our ends may be on the issue of illicit drugs they must never be a deceitful bill of goods pressed on us by Orwellian health-bureaucrats and their spin doctors.

In my opinion this two-decade-long deviant process has now breached the thin blue line. We have reached the point of de facto legalization. We witness now a joyless parade of messed-up people stumbling into the Skids of the Downtown Eastside. Once there they engage in vandalism and property crime and avoidance of abstention. They are deservedly ostracized and must be dealt with as the criminals they are.

As pointed out by the Vancouver Province columnist Joey Thompson in her Oct. 31 column: "Addicted professionals and Canada's rich and famous go cold turkey … they don't maintain use as a means of dealing with addiction, (so) why do we think street addicts should be treated any differently?"
I concur: if it works for the rich and famous, it will work for the halt and lame.
Harm reduction, once an adjunct process to abstention, now enables drug use and only chatters on about withdrawal and habitual abstinence.

When an addict says "To hell with the straight life, I'm copping-out," he has to be told: "No! We won't let you, we'll put you through detox right now and we'll help you through withdrawal and recovery."
Consider the truth of what Dickens said less than two centuries ago: "…Society is where men have to live, like it or not, no one escapes."

To paraphrase Dickens: What an addict rejects is not humanity or human life in general, but social life in particular.
Think it through folks. With harm reduction being pressed on us as the principal way to counteract addiction, trafficking and related property crime, the end result will be drug legalization. The unintended consequence with legalization will surely be an anything-goes upside-down society and bleak prospects for our vulnerable children and grandchildren targeted by black market drug gangs.

There are many leaders amongst us who will not cave in to the harm reduction crowd. One is recently retired Vancouver policeman Al Arsenault. He and his partners in Odd Squad Productions Society have worked countless off-duty hours to film and document the truth about Vancouver's deeply rooted drug world.
On Nov. 2, the New York Independent International Film and Video Festival awarded Odd Squad's Stolen Lives the 'Founder's Choice for a Documentary;' and Tears for April: Beyond the Blue Lens was awarded 'Excellence in Cinema for a Feature Film.'

I've seen both films and was stunned by the destructive consequences of chronic ingestion of illicit drugs, a reality far beyond any worst-case scenario I had in mind.
On Oct 27, after receiving word from the New York festival, Arsenault was ecstatic: "Here's some good news about our follow-up film to Through a Blue Lens. Tears for April: Beyond the Blue Lens represents 10 years of filming distilled into a 98-minute masterpiece! We are showing it at Cinemark's Tinseltown Cinema from Nov. 30 to Dec. 6, two matinees and two evening shows a day. Come and see the film that the Vancouver International Film Festival cared not to screen."

While Arsenault was in New York receiving acclaim for Tears for April, Vancouver was being examined by American newsman Dan Rather.
In a Vancouver Sun report on Nov. 2, headlined "Dan Rather here to show ugly side of Vancouver," columnist Miro Cernetig said "The Downtown Eastside, the poorest neighbourhood in Canada, has long been a time-bomb this city has never bothered to defuse. Now it's about to explode on the international stage. …
"When Rather sat down with Mayor Sam Sullivan Thursday, the newsman asked whether the world would see the "Dickensian" underbelly of Vancouver in 2010.

"He zeroed in on the mayor's drug policy and the Insite project which helps addicts to inject illegally obtained heroin. Isn't the mayor 'mollycoddling' drug users, prostitutes and ne'er-do-wells in the Downtown Eastside? The Texan asked."
According to Cernetig the mayor was also asked if Insite is tantamount to "state assisted suicide."
The jig is up Mayor Sullivan: Humpty-dumpy Vancouver is about to fall off the harm-reduction wall; and when it does, all your spin doctors and medical health officers will not be able to put Humpty Dumpty together again.

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This commentary was published in the North Shore News on Nov. 7, 2007