Our favourite drug causes major problems

Broken windows. Broken bones. Bar fights that spill out onto the street. The news of drunk young men and the latest harm they’ve caused in the downtown just keeps on coming.
The most recent news is of a Victoria police officer getting his leg broken after drunken young scrappers accidentally toppled him during a brawl outside the Pita Pit takeout restaurant. No doubt we’ll soon be talking again about early closure of the Pita Pit as a “solution,” as if the problem is in the gathering and not the fact that young men are drinking themselves into belligerent oblivion every weekend.
Not every young man is out there getting himself slam-faced drunk in the downtown, of course. Most aren’t. But a significant number are routinely drinking at harmful levels, posing a danger to themselves and anyone who crosses their path. That’s the problem we ought to be trying to fix.
I understand the appeal of alcohol, being a social drinker with a clear memory of how hard I drank myself for a couple of years when I was 14 or so. But that’s not to say I’m blind to alcohol’s many harms.
Even social drinkers risk long-term health problems from a lifetime of steady drinking. I co-wrote a book on addiction for ASPECT B.C. last year, and what lingered for me most from the research into the many drugs we take were alcohol’s powerful, lasting effects on every system of the body and mind.
And that’s just for starters. The one-off harms caused by a single night of drunkenness are legion. Car accidents, beatings, killings, robbery, domestic assault, sexual abuse, infidelity, on and on. We’re capable of immensely stupid and tragic acts when we drink too much.
For pregnant women, alcohol is one of the most dangerous drugs a woman can take in terms of the potential lifelong damage to the baby. It’s a “teratogenic” - a substance capable of crossing the placental wall and wreaking havoc on a developing fetus at the cellular level.
Yet our resistance in Canada even to label alcohol bottles with a warning about that says it all when it comes to the sacred-cow status alcohol enjoys in our society. Case in point: the FASD Community Circle asked the region’s mayors a couple years ago to abstain from alcohol for nine months as a gesture of support for non-drinking pregnant moms, and none of them would do it. (Good on Victoria Coun. Charlayne Thornton-Joe and her husband for jumping in.)
Then again, how many of us would agree to nine months booze-free? The average British Columbian over the age of 15 now consumes more than 500 alcoholic drinks annually. Among college and university students, one in eight binge-drink every weekend. Each year’s alcohol-sales stats show us drinking a little more than the year before, helped along by the 9,000 liquor stores and drinking establishments that now operate in B.C.
OK, so we love the stuff. But we’re going to have to get past that if we want to deal with the larger problems of harmful alcohol use.
UVic’s Centre for Addiction Research (CARBC) and the provincial medical health officer have done excellent work on this topic. They note that by 2002, the costs of alcohol-related problems in B.C. were already exceeding tax revenues from alcohol sales by $61 million a year. We’ve pushed those revenues up a little further every year since then by drinking more, but the alcohol-related harms always seem to increase faster.
CARBC advocates a variable liquor tax tied to the amount of pure alcohol in a particular product. In countries that have tried such taxing strategies, a beer with less alcohol sells for less than one with a higher level, which encourages consumers to buy lower-alcohol brands. The reverse is true right now for some alcoholic beverages in B.C.; coolers, for instance, actually get cheaper as alcohol content increases.
B.C. medical health officer Dr. Perry Kendall has urged the B.C. government to consider the impact of allowing 500 more liquor stores to open in the province in the past seven years, an increase of almost 40 per cent. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that consumption has gone up eight per cent in the same period of time.
We need a campaign - one that motivates through education, price point and prosecution, with particular relevance to the age group causing the bulk of the trouble downtown. We’ve danced around the edges long enough with our debates around pop-up urinals, staggered bar closings, and forced closure of takeout joints for the sin of selling food late at night.
The problem is drunkenness. The solution is less of it.

It's been quite a week. Canucks knocked out of the playoffs, Gordon Campbell's Liberals re-elected, all hope of electoral reform tossed out the window.
The Canucks and Campbell - so it goes. I've been waiting for the Canucks' big win for most of my lifetime, and I guess I still am. And on the Campbell front, it's not like I'm a solid supporter of any party. Still, it's discouraging to see that the Liberals can decimate the social supports of B.C. without getting even a sniff of kickback at the polls.
But the electoral-reform issue - oh, that one has broken my heart. I'd put a lot of stock into STV passing. Probably too much, in hindsight, but to me a "yes" vote would have been a signal that British Columbians were ready for real change. It's not like I thought STV would solve all the problems we endure due to the way we elect governments, but at the very least a yes vote would have been a clear statement that we want something better.
Instead, it got trashed. The politicians have no love for voting systems that give the people more power at the best of times, and we just handed them a perfect excuse for never having to raise the subject of electoral reform again. So that's it, then.
A while back, maybe when the Twin Towers got bombed, I discovered that Bobby Bare's version of "Blowing in the Wind" is the kind of song for moments like this.
I listened to it over and over that day in September 2001, and again when George Bush declared war on Iraq. It's playing on my iPod right now, and I might just keep it on for the rest of the afternoon. Hopes and dreams for a better B.C., blowin' in the wind...

Why I'm voting 'Yes!' to STV

You probably know who you’re voting for in Tuesday’s provincial election. I’m not going to try to influence your decision, other than to urge you to vote with brain on and eyes wide open.
But I do want to influence your vote on changing B.C.’s electoral system. You’ll have the chance to vote on that issue as well as pick an MLA when you go to the polls this Tuesday, and hopefully you’ll vote yes to STV.
The acronym stands for Single Transferrable Vote. Far more informed people than I can give you the lowdown as to the details of STV (I’ve listed some Web sites at the bottom of this column), but the short version is that it’s a way of voting in which the makeup of the legislature more closely mirrors the popular vote. If 45 per cent of voters pick Party A, 30 per cent pick Party B and 15 per cent pick C, then that will be the party breakdown inside the House.
The party that wins the biggest percentage of the popular vote still forms government, as is the case now. But individual MLAs wield more power in an STV-elected legislature. Ruling parties don’t get the run of the place to the same degree as they do under our current system.
The theory is that such proportional representation creates governments that are more responsible to those they govern. Critics of STV rightly note that there’s a higher risk of unstable minority governments under such a system. Supporters point to the benefits of more coalition-building and compromise, and the much greater chance of smaller parties and independents getting elected.
Many countries of the world use versions of STV. British Columbians were very close to that point themselves in 2005, when nearly 58 per cent of provincial voters said yes to the province’s initial STV referendum.
Alas, the threshold had been set at 60 per cent for that referendum (and this one), and so the vote failed. Now we have a second opportunity.
As I mentioned, I’m not an expert on voting systems. I doubt many of us are, or plan to become one in time for Tuesday’s election. Fortunately, a group of 160 randomly chosen British Columbians have already done the legwork for us.
Known as the Citizens’ Assembly, those 160 hard-working volunteers put in close to a year of research, public hearings and community presentations in 2004 after being asked by Premier Gordon Campbell to take on the task of assessing voting methods and recommending the best one.
The one they picked was STV. And if that’s the informed opinion of a diverse, apolitical citizens’ group after many months spent learning and listening, then that’s good enough for me.
In a “first past the post” system like the one we have, the only votes that ultimately count are those for the victorious party. The 1996 election year revealed the risks of such a system, when just 39 per cent of the popular vote went to Glen Clark’s New Democrats and yet the NDP still formed a majority government.
The 2001 election highlighted another quirk in the system. That time out, Gordon Campbell’s Liberals won 57 per cent of the popular vote, yet claimed 98 per cent of the seats in the legislature. For the next four years, B.C. was essentially a dictatorship, and not a particularly benevolent one.
With STV, every vote counts. You rank your vote - picking a first choice, a second, a third and so on - and thus are no longer picking one candidate but helping select a team of MLAs for your riding. Your first pick may or may not go on to win election, but your vote will still count for the candidates who were your backup choices.
The surplus votes of a landslide - wasted votes as well in their own way, seeing as the candidate didn’t actually need them to win - are also eliminated under STV. Once a candidate has secured enough votes to win election, any surplus votes for that same candidate instead go to voters’ second choices.
No voting system alone guarantees fair governance, of course. STV is merely a different way to vote, not a panacea for all that’s wrong in the legislatures of our country. But I think it’s our best chance for reminding governments who they work for.
Here are a few STV sites to get you started: Citizens' Assembly; Wikipedia; STV campaign; Michael Gobbi site. Or check out the Webcast of a Times Colonist-hosted debate on STV.
See you at the polls May 12.

Are we sure we're still on the way up?

I suppose every generation wants to believe it’s improving on the past. That’s how it always seemed in my history lessons at school, too - that we were intent on working our way up, from “primitive” to medieval to Renaissance and right on through to the enlightened human beings of modern times.
We’ve made some remarkable progress. We’re healthier than we’ve ever been, and easily surviving diseases that once used to kill us off in vast numbers. We don’t just talk about human rights, we enshrine them in our laws. We wear our seatbelts, bicycle helmets, sunscreen and in-car sobriety with pride, and are better for it.
I used to ponder ugly moments in history and feel grateful for not having been alive in those years. The destructive and stupid behaviours of human beings through the ages baffled me, but I was happy that my generation dwelt in kinder, gentler times and was in turn leaving a better world for their own children.
But is that what’s actually happening? Is life in Canada improving? I’ve got my doubts, given the wear and tear of two decades of federal and provincial governments whose actions have seriously eroded the social fabric of the Canada I was born into.
I don’t mean to suggest another Crusades is imminent, or that we’ll soon be using wild animals to kill off the old and weak in front of a cheering crowd of thousands.
But the disasters of history start out small - one thing and then another, each piling on top of each other to bend a country in a way that no one had expected. The emergence of a growing underclass in Canada is of no small concern.
The decline most evident to me after most of a lifetime in B.C. is a loss of economic and political power for the “common people,” if you will. It’s a subtle change that has come about incrementally, aggravated by a prevailing political ideology in which minimal government is the stated goal even while power and money accumulate at the top in ways that are very nearly feudal.
An interesting statistic, courtesy of child advocacy group First Call and Stats Canada: Between 1989 and 2006, the richest 10 per cent of B.C. families with children saw their average annual income rise 30 per cent, to $201,490. In that same period, the poorest 10 per cent of families saw their income fall eight per cent, to $15,657.
The richest of the rich in Canada more than doubled their average yearly income in the years between 1982 and 2004, to $2.5 million. The years weren’t as kind to families in the bottom 10 per cent, who by 2004 had average income of a mere $6,000 a year.
That’s not to say rich people aren’t entitled to their wealth. No doubt many work very hard for the money. But the growing gap between the rich and poor in Canada didn’t come about because the rich work hard and the poor are lazy. We’ve had a series of governments whose policies have made things better for those who already had it pretty good, and considerably worse for those just getting by.
In B.C., one of the first things to go was the fishing industry, given away by Ottawa to a handful of wealthy men. Next was forestry, to the point that even the land where the trees once grew now gets handed off to developers without a whisper of consultation.
Our social systems have become twisted versions of themselves, to the point where our governments reward themselves for taking away people’s benefits.
In the first year of B.C.’s intensified crackdown on welfare under the Liberals, a deputy minister received a $15,400 bonus for slashing the welfare caseload by 22 per cent. Eight years on, there’s little evidence that anything about the immensely costly welfare-to-work years have benefited British Columbians (see http://thetyee.ca/News/2009/04/27/Poverty/). A massive increase in homelessness in the same period has in fact increased the cost and extent of poverty dramatically.
Meanwhile, employment insurance is now so difficult to get that barely 30 to 40 per cent of unemployed Canadians qualify for it, even while Ottawa sits on a $54-billion EI surplus. If you feel frustratingly powerless to change such things, as I do, that’s a pretty serious signal that we’ve lost control of our governments.
In less than two weeks, a new government will be elected in B.C. For the sake of a better tomorrow, please pick with care and thoughtfulness. And vote “yes” for STV, which at least puts a little power back into the hands of the people.

U.S. road trip an eyeopener into true impact of recession

I’m newly back this week from a road trip through California, and had been curious before we left whether we’d see evidence of the economic downturn during our travels.
In fact, the signs of trouble were hard to miss. We were travelling routes that primarily took us through small towns, and it took but a glance at the lineup of grim legal notices in virtually every community’s local newspaper to grasp the impact the recession is having in the U.S.
The April 8 edition of the Pahrump Valley Times, for instance, featured close to five pages of legal notices, almost all of them involving trustee sales of houses in foreclosure. The legal language of the ads made things sound very dry and orderly, but it didn’t take much to imagine the distress of the overwhelmed, indebted homeowner at the heart of every one of them.
One California auction company handling foreclosures lists almost 1,400 homes for sale - and that’s just one company, in one state. Nationally, more than 800,000 households in the U.S. went into foreclosure in the first quarter of 2009. (RealtyTrac.com, which is monitoring the issue, notes on its Web site that the real number will likely surpass a million by the time all the “latent foreclosure activity” is sorted out.)
Last month alone, some 341,000 U.S. households went into foreclosure - a 12 per cent jump over any month on record. In parts of Caifornia, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Idaho, as many as one in every 55 houses are now in foreclosure. A new industry has sprung up just to deal with empty houses, which are attracting looters and squatters - in some cases, the rousted families who have nowhere else to go.
Some of the routes we drove have been in trouble for a while, of course. The stretch of highway between Las Vegas and Hawthorne, Nev., was dotted with struggling towns on the brink of collapse 10 years ago when we travelled through there.
But some of those communities are now full-out ghost towns. At least one abandoned roadside motel - and more likely two or three - was for sale in every little community we passed through. Restaurants, country stores, car dealerships, mall spaces - even brothels - sat empty and boarded up.
We found permanent residents in every RV park we pulled into, and not the typical older couple enjoying a travel-filled retirement. In Oregon, we came across a two-car family living out of their fifth-wheel trailer at an RV park steps away from Interstate 5. They’d been living there for more than a year.
Housing is housing, mind you, and a fifth-wheel is better than nothing. But these are people living in RV parks not because they choose to, but because they have to. Meanwhile, the U.S. newspapers detail the stories of those other folks - the homeless, whose numbers are dramatically on the rise as well.
In Clark County, Nev. - the region that encompasses Las Vegas - almost 13,500 people are now living homeless. That’s nearly a 20 per cent increase from the last count two years ago. Two-thirds of those surveyed reported they’re homeless because they lost their job. Almost a fifth of the homeless are military veterans, primarily from the Vietnam, Persian Gulf and Afghanistan wars.
Child poverty is on the rise, too, and President Barack Obama’s promise to get that problem fixed by 2015 isn’t doing much to help the hungry kids and cash-strapped schools grappling with a worrying increase in families who qualify for subsidized meal programs.
In Portland, Ore., the schools in poor neighbourhoods continue to see the most demand, with more than 90 per cent of families in some parts of the city now dependent on subsidized meals for their children. But nine middle-class neighbourhoods are also reporting a rise in qualifying families.
On the bright side, property prices are truly astounding right now in the states we passed through. If you’ve ever fantasized about having a modest rancher somewhere in the interior of California or Nevada on an acre or two of land, these are dream days. Don’t bet the farm on our own real-estate market recovering any time soon when prices are this low in the U.S.
What’s it all going to mean for Canada? That’s the big question, with enough differences between our two countries that it’s hard to make any predictions with much certainty. But when your most important neighbour and trading partner is in this much trouble, I’d brace for a rough ride.