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From: The Canadian Harm Reduction Network [mailto:noharm@canadianharmreduction.com]
Sent: Tuesday, October 09, 2007 6:52 AM
Subject: Ideology Trumps Science in the Harper Government's "New" Drug Policy
Ideology Trumps Science in the Harper Government’s "New" Drug Policy
Concerned that "certain forces" have changed culture so that drug use is no longer dissuaded and is at times encouraged, Stephen Harper’s new conservative government has announced its "new" drug policy. It is a policy which is strongly indebted for its innovativeness to the failed American model, the "War on Drugs". The "War on Drugs" was initiated by Richard Nixon and has been embraced by each of his successors. No one has been more strongly committed to it, however, than George W. Bush, who has melded it into the War on Terrorism.
Until now, Canada has not wholeheartedly subscribed to the "War on Drugs". We pursued a more holistic approach which included treatment, enforcement, prevention and harm reduction - a "Four Pillars" approach, more like some of the successful European models. This was the case even in the most recent iteration of our drug strategy, completed about two years ago after extensive multi-sectoral and community input.
Harper’s government is taking a sharp turn away from this, however, and it will likely cost Canada dearly in terms of increased disease and ruined lives, not to mention its reputation in most parts of the world save the USA
Twenty five years ago, Richard Nixon declared a "War On Drugs". Since then, according to Richard Stevenson of The Fraser Institute, "by just about every measure, drug problems have intensified and proliferated".
In the United States - largely as a result of the "War on Drugs" - drug arrests have more than tripled over the years, totalling a record 1.8 million arrests in 2005. Currently the USA has a higher proportion of its population incarcerated than any other country in the world for which reliable statistics are available, reaching a total of 2.2 million inmates in the US in 2005. Over the past 20 years there has been an increase of from 10% to 30% in the jail population devoted to drug offenders, according to Professor Neil Boyd, Associate Director of the School of Criminology at Simon Fraser University. "That’s what mandatory minimums do". (CBC Radio 1, The House, 6 October 2007) Mandatory minimum sentences are one of the planks in Harpers’ "new" policy, which overall has a strong emphasis on enforcement at the expense of other approaches.
Since the initiation of the "War on Drugs", however, at a cost of approximately $60 million a year, expended at the rate of approximately $600 per second, America has seen no decrease in drug use.
The identification of treatment and education as elements of Canada’s "new" drug strategy’s is important. However, much will depend on the direction these elements take.
The proposed prevention campaign targeted at youth and their parents is reminiscent of the US-style "Just Say No" campaign, a campaign that has not worked. Without a doubt, we need to engage youth in a frank and open discussion about alcohol and other drugs, so that they can understand the risks and make better, more informed decisions. However, according to Leon Mar of the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, education programs such as the one proposed by the Harper government have previously proved ineffective. "Health Canada’s own review of the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program implemented widely across Canada", he said, "has shown that the program does not prevent or delay drug use."
Treatment, of course, is under provincial jurisdiction. Whatever programs the federal government might mandate or choose to fund, one hopes that they recognise that treatment services need to be flexible and meet people where they are at. For some people abstinence-based programs work extremely well. But there is a significant group of people for whom, say, maintenance on methadone, or buprenorphine, or heroin are more appropriate, if not necessary, strategies.
A palpable concern is that the Harper government will impose ideological criteria on funding for its treatment initiatives, as they have on some research projects. According to an article in the Vancouver Courier (5 October 2007), a "gag order" imposed on the results of research has impelled the BC Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDSu7ui to reject a contract with the federal government for further research about Insite, the Safe Injection Site in Vancouver. "We could produce an analysis showing that there’s been a huge reduction in some type of health outcome and then have the health minister stand up and say once again the research has shown nothing--and we’re supposed to sit there and not say anything," explained Dr. Thomas Kerr, a senior scientist with the Centre. "It was a very politically motivated contract, and we just couldn’t do it. We don’t work that way." (Quoted in the Vancouver Courier, 5 October 2007)
The drug strategy put forward by Prime Minister Harper, together with Stockwell Day and Tony Clement, provides no funding or support for harm reduction measures. These include, of course, Vancouver’s safe injection site, which has become the federal government’s whipping boy, and more alarmingly for the distribution of clean needles and safe inhalation equipment, which are critical to stemming the spread of HIV, hepatitis C and other infectious diseases among people who use drugs and their partners - nor, for that matter, for opiate or methadone maintenance, which are important elements of harm reduction treatment.
In fact, Harper has stated that harm reduction is not a "distinct pillar" of his strategy, and that he is cool to the idea of it. "I remain a skeptic", he said, "that you can tell people we won’t stop the drug trade, we won’t get you off drugs, we won’t even send messages to discourage drug use, but somehow we will keep you addicted and yet reduce the harm just the same." This statement is a deliberate distortion of what harm reduction does, and flouts extensive scientific date, and I would be surprised if Mr. Harper didn’t knows this.
Tony Clement, at a Canadian Medical Association meeting last month, was quoted saying "harm reduction, in a sense, takes many forms. To me, prevention is harm reduction. Treatment is harm reduction. Enforcement is harm reduction." This is another conscious distortion as well as a devious attempt to co-opt the term harm reduction to support incarceration.
Note that this is the Minister of Health speaking.
From the point of view of health - the health of the Canadian public - incarceration will lead to more people becoming infected with HIV and Hepatitis C. For example, it has been estimated that 21% of all HIV infections among injection drug users in Vancouver occur in jails. There is very good reason to believe that the number of Hepatitis C infections which originate in jails and prisons is even greater. These infections don’t remain behind bars. They move out into the community as people are discharged.
Our jails and prisons are wells of HIV and hepatitis C infections. And, locking people up in them is NOT harm reduction. Real harm reduction has been very successful in reduction the spread of infectious diseases. Jails and prisons have failed at it. Thus, the current Harper drug policy risks creating epidemics of HIV and hepatitis C - for the sake of ideology - and is contrary to what should be seen as good public health practice.
Finally some notice must be taken of the government’s use of language.
It is not merely that simplistic language reflects simplistic thinking about the complex issues of drug misuse, which it does in this instance, but that comments such as "The Party’s Over" for people who use drugs, made by Mr. Clement show both a lack of understanding and an underlying contempt for people who use drugs. For many people, including young people, this is not a party.
Mark Townsend, director of the Portland Hotel Society in Vancouver, said that Harper doesn’t understand the scourge of drug addiction. "It’s depressing to see his [Harper’s] lack of leadership on that and now he is out there trying to find a new study that will say the world is flat," Townsend said. (CBC News, 4 October 2007)
Neil Boyd commented, (again on "The House, 6 October 2007) that "one of the problems I fear comes in listening to Mr. Clement, listening to Mr. Harper - is they don’t really understand the desperation and the ravages of drug addiction at the very far end of the continuum . The problem for that very small group of users is not the drugs. The problem is that people live that way. And these are not people who need to be hit harder. They need support and, I fear, in the language, the rhetoric that I hear from Mr. Harper and Mr. Clement, I don’t hear really ... I hear a double speak. I don’t really hear compassion for users."
Further, referring to all people who sell drugs as the "bad guys", as Mr. Clement did on The House, may be strategic - even cute - but it is not necessarily true. As Neil Boyd pointed out, all-inclusive labelling such as this does not permit discrimination between the non-addicted big-time dealers and the user-dealer who sells small quantities of drugs simply to support an unquenchable habit. Courts are full of the latter. If we consider the year 2006 - the first year of the Harper government - the increase in arrests for possession of marijuana ranged between 20 and 50%, depending on the city, over those made in 2005. This is scarcely compassion.
Barry McKnight is chief of the Frederickton Police Force and chair of the drug abuse committee of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police. He said, on CBC’s The House (6 October 2007) that "from a police perspective you can guarantee that we - because we work with people who suffer from addictions on a day-to-day basis, whether they be victims of crime, as they frequently are, as well as involved in committing crimes, we understand the lifestyle that those people are living. And they haven’t chosen to live that way, and they need to get into treatment too."
As Neil Boyd summed up, again on CBC’s The House, "the policies and the approach which the Harper Government plans to take will increase risk. It will increase risk. It will increase risk for users. It will increase profit for dealers. It’s the kind of approach that - perhaps inadvertently, I don’t know - but certainly quite clearly puts more profit into the hands of organised crime."
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