One more walk down the road to failure

Sunil Kargwal, Pixabay

Thank you to long-time community organizer Ann Livingston for pointing me to this 17-year-old blog post that takes us back to 1950s Vancouver to remind us that there's nothing new about the strategies being talked about now to improve health care for people who use substances - or the political tactics used to block those efforts.

The Community Chest and Council, the forerunner to the United Way, struck a Narcotics Committee in 1952 to examine the problem. The Committee recommended a comprehensive drug strategy that included rehab centres, educational campaigns, and stiffer penalties for traffickers. But what really stirred debate was its proposal for clinics that would provide maintenance-level doses of heroin to addicts.

The drug clinic scheme was intended to “maintain a constant check on the number of addicts in any community. It would also protect the life of the addict and support him as a useful member of society. This existence would hasten his rehabilitation, or at least reduce the amount of his addiction since many of the stresses in the addict’s life would be reduced.” What’s regarded today as the novel philosophy of harm reduction was simple pragmatism in 1952.

Both the Province and Sun newspapers printed the Community Chest’s report along with gushing editorials endorsing its recommendations. The Sun noted that Vancouver alone had four times as many addicts as all of Britain, leaving “little doubt that the European system of cheap drugs and medical treatment is infinitely superior to our faltering system of straight police suppression.” The editor agreed that the Community Chest’s plan would eliminate the illegal drug trade by “destroying its root – the fabulous underworld profit in drugs.”

The Community Chest anticipated resistance to the drug clinics, predicting they would be “violently opposed by those who profit from drug trafficking and one should expect opposition and interference from such criminals.” Stiff opposition did kill the clinic plan, but it came from the government rather than criminals.

Soon enough, the government of the day was promoting involuntary care. What is now Matsqui Institution was in fact purpose-built in 1966 for the forced treatment of men and women using heroin. But they built it so it could be repurposed as a prison just in case - a good move, as it turns out, because the forced-treatment project was deemed a failure a mere three years later and Matsqui became just another jail. 

The John Howard Society also reported “a radical upswing in addict deaths in BC” since Matsqui opened. [The JHS's] Mervyn Davis explained that it was probably “the result of increasing police pressure on the drug market, which usually results in inferior drugs and a wider variety of potentially dangerous drugs – such as barbiturates – being used as a substitute for heroin.”

 But hey, 20 times is the charm, right? With more than 17,000 dead just since BC declared a state of emergency almost nine years ago and such a long, long history of abject failure on this issue, you'd think we might be ready for something new. Nope. We're pulling back even farther, leaving politicians, police and hysterical media pundits to continue calling the shots on a massive public health crisis. 

Watch this segment on moral panic from the Peers Victoria speaker series on the toxic drug crisis that just wrapped this week. There's the conversation we need to be having.