police work

Maybe the Mounties should spend more time and resources on policework and less time on political lobbying and interferring in our health care system. If they didn't fail miserably with the war on drugs, Insite wouldn't need to exist.

Murdock, I doubt reviving the provincial police would be a step forward, although you can bet the RCMP's political influence is the single biggest obstacle to the establishment of a metropolitan police force for Metro Vancouver.

Btw, "E" Division is the RCMP division for all of BC, not "a Vancouver-based drug squad."

reduction

Insite represents an attempt to reduce the harm done to addicts while waiting for them to "choose" to become wealthy and urbane Liberals.

It's altogether inappropriate for the RCMP to hold ideological views that differ from the mainstream scientific thinking. I wouldn't say that they've failed to reduce the supply of drugs until I became convinced that they have ever tried to do so.

It seems quite arguable to me that the monopoly on drugs has been protected, rather than endangered by police actions over the last few decades. In general, small time operators and peripheral operations only have been taken. This has the appearance of competition control, much more than a real attempt to end trafficking.

One must of course admit that addicts will take drugs regardless of any effort by anyone, but how are addicts made? Any answer to that question will have to include factors such as poverty, poor education, endemic hopelessness, cynical manipulation of the political system to create enormous wealth for a select few, while relegating larger and larger numbers to homeless misery.

Of course the wealthy then think of the ones who are run over by this financial Machiavellianism as excrement. They've been eaten alive, their natural fate would be to become excrement. But the police have no right to hold that view.

If supply reduction is not doable, and treatment will not be funded for whatever reason, and the leaders of the society hold to the philosophy of the corporation, i.e. 'if you can't stop me from robbing you, then I have the right to do so, and you then have no right to survive', harm reduction is the only approach that remains.

We could always start treating addiction effectively, with hospital treatment, then provide stable homes and assistance building lives. We could legalize drugs completely, destroying the illicit profits that drive this crime wave and ridding society of a whole class of wealthy criminals.

But then the powers that be, Federal Police forces included, would have to admit their complicity in this miserable failure of policy, and also admit that these people are human beings. And not really excrement at all.

The American connection

Everyone should take a look at the pdf that Pivot provided. They clearly detail that a lot of the internal emails were from the mailing list of the Drug Free America Foundation Inc. (dfaf.org) -- a foundation that has been helping certain elements subvert drug policy reform in canada.

This is more than just the police being caught at meddling in politics. The RCMP have been exposed as taking direction from American lobbyists.

This is an important sovereignty issue, and needs to be an election issue.

Stephane, Jack, Elizabeth?

RCMP internal emails

The documents:

http://www.pivotlegal.org/pdfs/RCMPsecretlyfundedresearch-documents.pdf

....how are addicts made?

Baily asks, and answers his question with :

".....Any answer to that question will have to include factors such as poverty, poor education, endemic hopelessness, cynical manipulation of the political system to create enormous wealth for a select few, while relegating larger and larger numbers to homeless misery."

This is the standard Lefty perspective, which ties the major causes of addiction to socio-political origins. This misperception is the result, I think, of the fact that by far the majority of addicts who get enmeshed in the public legal / health care systems - and are therefore counted - are the poor, who wind up there because of personal economics which are the RESULT of their addictions, but which were not the CAUSE of those addictions.

I think we agreed on another thread that there are very likely as many or more addicts at all levels of society who never, because of financial security, status, family support etc, become part of the drug-related stats we all love to quote. They become part of the DTES group ONLY when they lose their support system. Thus, the neocons can pretend drug addiction is a problem confined to "losers".

My point here, Bailey, is that when you state socio-economics as a CAUSE of addiction rather than an EFFECT, you weaken the legalisation argument. I know this is a Lefty hobby-horse, but it is simply wrong.

One of the results of this misconception is that the sneering neocon can define druggies as parasitical non-achievers, and Lefties as their natural allies.

Since the parallels with Alcohol / Prohibition and the "War against Drugs" are so obvious, the futility of the latter should be readily apparent to any thinking person.

The main reason a person becomes addicted to a drug is because of the "high" it delivers, not because of his/her social status. Part of it's seductiveness is that many if not most people can use without becoming hooked, whereas for others the high so fulfills their wants or needs that they will risk everything to indulge.

Until we can come up with effective ways to warn against or prevent that syndrome, all our present efforts will remain only bandaids over the open sore. Until then, things can only get worse.

As the Police say

" 1) People (usually crack addicts/IV users) setting up flea market set-ups on sidewalks all over the DTES

2) People congregating in the lanes/on the sidewalks and fighting with each other over drug-related matters

3) Drug trafficking on the street by addicted/non-addicted individuals - creating public disorder problems with their activities

4) Violence and assaults related to the drug trade in the DTES

5) People urinating and defecating all over the place

6) Open drug use - both injecting and smoking of drugs

7) Psychoses after drug use

8) Mental Health issues

9) Movement of stolen property

10) Intoxicated individuals in the DTES - from both bars (although not many are open any more in the DTES) and consumption of intoxicants like rubbing alcohol and mouthwash

11) Garbage scattered from one end of the DTES to the other – generated by the addicted individuals in the DTES"

A fair description of the Downtown East Side of Vancouver. I see and smell it frequently.

The other day I met a good looking teen-aged woman who approached me with the offer of oral sex. This poor child had drifted to the area after what she said was an aggressive home-life in the BC interior. She understood and stated that many people in the area are ruthless and 'use' drifting people like her but she doesn't know where to go, or what to do to get out again, except sell her body. Her solace will probably come from street drugs and perhaps eventually she will be directed to the injection clinic, since that's what available and too easy to do.

During the 1960s in Europe people like her would go to France or Italy and pick fruit or hops during the seasons, before they decided what to do with their lives and settle down. In BC, and much of Canada, they drift to the DTES and get high and spiral down wasted. All one has to do is be awake and standing and drugs are available on and between every corner and at every doorway. The drugs-accepting industry wants injection rooms to sprout like Starbucks shops, in the name of compassion, so young girls like her will accept them as the place to go to when one arrives in the city feeling kind of down and lost. Too bad. Very sad.

Picking hops and living rough

Certainly weren't exclusive to the 60s - but it certainly dates someone who remembers it.

'Pleasant' memories indeed.

Perhaps you should pick up a copy of 'Down and Out in Paris and London' realisticman.

The really ruthless ones are the Campbell Crime Family and their refusal to increase the minimum wage whilst looking after their friends and letting their buddies in the forest industry ship raw logs out of BC for the cost of cartage....What's sad is that the resources that could address this nightmare are being wasted on garbage and a circuses.

RCMP: former icons fade to pale pink

What else should we expect? The current RCMP's an organization of neanderthals that would like to see Canada become as draconian as the US is in law enforcement and their [in]justice system, including the US style war on drugs so admired by our Mounties.

The RCMP would just love to ramp up the war on drugs in Canada to crazed levels seen in the US, but seen in few other Western nations.

To do this, illegal drugs, their users and suppliers need to be demonized and criminalized to the Nth degree.
Addiction must not be viewed as a health and harm reduction issue, but rather as a
problem with "criminal" substance partakers and purveyors who must be investigated, charged and jailed for lengthy sentences.
Of course, the real crime associated with drugs: property crime, organized crime and its violence, is not due to the drugs themselves, but to their ILLEGALITY.

Alcohol prohibition in the US only served to strengthen and enrich mafiosi like Al Capone (not to mention Canada's own Bronfman family whose fortune derived largely from Sam's bootlegging hard liquor to the States in association with organized crime there. It didn't stop Americans from drinking as copiously as they liked.

People died then from drinking bathtub gin poisoned with methanol, just as addicts today die from unregulated dosages of street drugs. As with alcohol,drugs are much more dangerous in illegal/unregulated form than legal and regulated.

Drug law enforcement is Big Business in the US, a goldmine for police departments and the often privatized US prisons industry, creating and maintaining lots of
well paying jobs for the enforcers.

The war on drugs is thus largely a lucrative, cynical make work project, but an ongoing failure when it comes to reducing drug use, it's supposed intended aim.

It's only a "success" in victimizing addicts of illegal drugs, and in making sure the victimizers keep their well-paid jobs. But it's the legal drugs that are the most deadly and destructive of all, not the illegal ones. Hypocrisy, anyone?

Programs like Insite are a threat to the anti-drug warriors, including the RCMP.
RCMP see a scary societal shift, a shift to treating drugs largely as a health issue, moving away from the (failed) law enforcement model.

Going down this road,
police officers could be laid-off,
as drug law enforcers' raison d'etre
starts disappearing. Thus a large piece of the lucrative law enforcement pie may shrink, and with it, police jobs! What a tragedy!

No wonder the RCMP has tried everything it can to mislead the public about Insite, and to improperly denigrate the science of dozens of peer reviewed medical studies into harm reduction that prove programs like Insite work.

But no doubt many new, useful jobs in the medical, addiction and counseling fields would emerge -- in a saner society
with a saner approach to drugs.

And to think our Mounties were once loved and admired icons, respected in Canada and elsewhere as the most honourable police force in the world! Those were the days.

Policed politics...

at what point do will Canadian *citizens* begin to directly question their local Community Peace Officers?

begin challenging the 'Law Enforcement' self-defining errors?

begin showing up at *every* municipal meeting & demanding that our *community peace officers* become better trained at the social skills we require?

... redirecting our community's police budgeting?
...& keeping *our* police busy enough THAT THEY REMEMBER THEY'RE NOT OUR SOCIAL or POLITICAL LEADERSHIP?

VICE IS NOT CRIME...
the crime happens when you create the circumstances that criminalizes human behaviour & drives fear.

People who LIKE taking orders & enforcing Will shouldn't be the people who determine the rules... they simply aren't capable of doing it responsibly or inclusively.

I believe their role is to support the community, not define who *their community will include*.

I have respect for our police... but their duty is to the entirety of the population, not their preferred interests & HR dossiers.

Spread Love, not corporate dependence...
BlueBerry Pick'n
can be found @
ThisCanadian
~~~
"... tolerance of intolerance is cowardice..." ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
"We, two, form a Multitude" ~ Ovid.
"Violence can only be concealed by a Lie, & the Lie can only be maintained by Violence." ... "Any man who has once proclaimed violence as his method is inevitably forced to take thelie as his principle" – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities." - Voltaire
~~~
"Silent Freedom is Freedom Silenced"

Choice

ME2; I've started this reply twice, I want to respond to your idea that cause and effect are somehow separable and independent phenomena. Controllable by humans who are caught in the whirlwind. The idea is so complex and contradictory as to make my head spin, and quite surprisingly emotionally charged. This will be a very long post if I go there.

Let me try another approach. I lived in Vancouver around the time the gentrification of Gastown pushed it's poor population Burnabyward. I used to go downtown frequently to eat at a fish restaurant called the Only. It's still there, kittycorner from Insite. The food was amazing, bought fresh every morning from the fishboats a few blocks away.

At that time, while there were a few regulars, most inhabitants around there were workers. Caught up in the boom and bust cycles, when the economy was booming these people would go to work in the woods or camps or on the boats. In the bust, they'd be back living cheap and getting shabbier, waiting for a new job.

I was on that block last weekend again, after some decades. The Plank gallery has some photographs that seem quite meaningful in that setting. I walked down to the Only to see if it was still there. I was appalled at the human images on that block.

I have an analytical bent, and as I went there I searched for evidence that would help me understand what I saw. I remarked to my companion that the prevailing view is that all this is 'choice'. Her reaction was instant. "No!".

She was right. There were elements on that block that were in possession of a choice, 2 battered police cars parked unattended, a group of Hispanic youths strutting and laughing, a well fed man sporting a crucifix. But the great majority were clear victims of circumstance.

Nobody chooses to become ill. Nor to be betrayed, beaten or raped. Nor to be evicted, have one's job 'outsourced'. Nor to be run over and destroyed by the manipulations of bankers, politicians and businessmen who have repudiated and denied their duties to their countries, communities and society.

This is admittedly a statistical view. Nobody can predict which people become victims of these circumstances, but I submit that the way the numbers have grown and solidified gives the lie to any argument that choice plays a significant role. Certainly if you look back on the life of any individual, you can point to mistakes or whatever, and call them causes, then refocus on the present and call it effect.

But if it were true, the numbers would not show such a clear correlation with the reduction of funding to social services, and the growth of the Objectivist corporate philosophy in the halls of power in our society.