Mayor wants city exempted from federal narcotics laws
Sullivan proposes 'revolutionary' treatment plan for addicts
Monday, January 22, 2007
Byline: Frances Bula
Source: Vancouver Sun
Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan is lobbying the federal government for an exemption from Canada's narcotics laws that would allow what he calls a "revolutionary" alternative drug-treatment plan to give substitute drugs to at least 700 cocaine and crystal-meth addicts.
If he is successful, Vancouver would be a global pioneer in running such a large-scale program of drug maintenance for stimulant-drug users.
Sullivan said the drug plan, along with three other key elements that have to come from Ottawa or Victoria, will eliminate most of Vancouver's problems with homelessness, panhandling and drug-dealing. Those are the three social problems he promised to reduce by half in time for 2010 in the Project Civil City initiative that he launched in November.
Although the project document listed 54 suggested strategies aimed at everything from mental illness and homelessness to litter and motorcycle noise, Sullivan said the city won't have that much work to do if the provincial and federal governments tackle the big, underlying issues.
The other three elements he says are key:
- The province needs to provide the money to build social housing on 12 empty sites the city has available for it;
- The province needs to come up with a more aggressive plan for taking care of the mentally ill, which might mean moving some back to Riverview Hospital in Coquitlam;
- The federal government needs to ensure that community courts are used to channel drug users into the alternative drug program he envisions.
But he sees the drug plan, which would provide legal drugs as substitutes for the stimulant-type illegal drugs like cocaine and crystal meth, as pivotal, and he says that's the focus of most of his energy.
"An alternative drug-treatment program is central," he said.
Although medical researchers or health agencies in Texas, the U.K., and Australia have experimented with various substitute drugs to give to cocaine and crystal-meth addicts, a grand-scale program involving hundreds of users has never been tried.
Sullivan admits that what he is proposing would be a "far more robust trial" than any tried elsewhere, but he believes the federal government will be willing to consider it because of the desire to improve Vancouver's social conditions in time for the Olympics.
"There's only one reason this would be granted, because of the time pressure of the Olympics."
Sullivan said that plan will require a federal-government exemption from existing narcotics laws, similar to the exemption needed to allow the city's supervised-injection site to operate, since it involved allowing health-care workers to help people use drugs that are currently illegal.
The mayor shies away from giving too many specifics about the alternative drug-treatment plan, saying only that it's an "unusual" proposal he has worked on for eight months, sometimes changing it "to accommodate the political realities."
But he has dropped hints about it in various documents and speeches. According to the Project Civil City booklet that was released with his announcement, one of his ideas is to "establish a new prescription treatment program that targets 700 of the most chronic offenders who suffer from drug addiction."
He also touched on it briefly in his state-of-the-city speech Tuesday, saying it would be revolutionary.
The mayor is working closely with David Holtzman, a former executive director of Leadership Vancouver and of A Loving Spoonful, a West End food program for AIDS patients, who is devoting himself to gathering research, talking to potential funders, and setting up a non-profit organization focused on lobbying for and funding the alternative drug-treatment program.
Sullivan acknowledged this week for the first time that John Lefebvre, the Internet gambling millionaire and philanthropist who was charged in the the U.S. this week for conspiring to promote illegal gambling, is the person who offered $500,000 last spring to help fund an alternative drug-treatment program.
However, Sullivan stressed that the money was not given directly to him. Instead, he suggested that Lefebvre give it to the non-profit organization once it is set up.
For the moment, however, Holtzman said he is not being paid by anyone to work on the treatment proposal, although he has been working on it full-time since December.
Holtzman has attended several city hall meetings with Sullivan to talk to various groups and senior city staff about the drug plan.
But Sullivan says until the four key social programs are in place -- the drug plan, housing, mental-illness plan, and community courts -- he won't push very hard on the enforcement side of his plan to create a more civil city.
"I'm reluctant to go aggressively on enforcement issues until we have dealt with the social side of things," the mayor said.
Once "we have separated the addicted and the mentally ill from the criminals," then the city can go after those who continue to panhandle or deal drugs, he said.
"In the next while, I intend to prepare the police for their role in that."
- back to top -