SNUD Committee Meeting

SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON NON-MEDICAL USE OF DRUGS

COMITÉ SPÉCIAL SUR LA CONSOMMATION NON MÉDICALE DE DROGUES OU MÉDICAMENTS

EVIDENCE

[Recorded by Electronic Apparatus]

Monday, December 3, 2001

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[English]

The Chair (Ms. Paddy Torsney (Burlington, Lib.): [Technical Difficulty—Editor]...Chief Constable Ian Mackenzie; and from the Vancouver Police Department, Inspector Kash Heed, who's the commanding officer of the vice/drugs section. I've seen your name many times in the newspaper. From the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency we have Brian Flagel, director, customs border services, Vancouver International Airport district.

Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming before us. If you can try to keep presentations to roughly ten minutes, it will give us a chance for some questions and answers. Should there be something in your prepared presentation that you can just let us read later, that will be fine. The Q and A part is really helpful for us.

I will go in the order I introduced you, unless you have made some other arrangements.

First is Deputy Chief Ditchfield.

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Deputy Chief Peter Ditchfield (Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia): Thank you very much, Madam Chair, and thank you, members, for the opportunity to speak to your committee this afternoon.

As this is a public forum, my comments have been somewhat sanitized; however, I have much more information, should the members feel it appropriate to ask for it at a later date. I will also be making reference to some issues surrounding the Vancouver ports and the business of B.C. marijuana. I have reference material on that as well, which I will give to you, Madam Chair, at the end of the presentations.

While the mandate of this committee is a broad one, the purpose of this brief is to advise the committee of the widespread involvement, at all levels of organized crime, in the importation, production, and trafficking in non-medical drugs.

The Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia has been operational for two years and has a mandate to disrupt and suppress organized crime that affects British Columbians. During this period, the agency has identified and confirmed crime trends through intelligence-led, project-based, enforcement initiatives.

Primary targets of the agency, since its inception, have been Asian-based organized crime and Outlaw motorcycle gangs, which are seen as two of the major threats in this province, although other groups proliferate. The globalization of organized crime has created alliances between many groups, due to the vast profits engendered through trafficking in illicit drugs. These alliances continually develop and become permanent or semi-permanent and quite short term, as the issue develops.

Prior to discussing specific groups, the importance of the British Columbia marijuana industry must be stressed. It's estimated that there are between 15,000 and 20,000 grow operations in the lower mainland of British Columbia, and the annual value of the marijuana trade is in the region of $6 billion. These are conservative estimates. Profits from this industry fuel the engine of organized crime in this province and provide funds for the importation and manufacture of drugs that are much more detrimental to the health and safety of Canadians.

First I'll comment on Asian-based organized crime and the Dai Huen Jai, or, as they're commonly referred to, the Big Circle Boys. They have been active in British Columbia since their arrival from mainland China around 1986, and Vancouver was their first port of call. They are now certainly North America-wide and are involved in organized crime in Europe also.

They are active in numerous criminal activities, including the high-level counterfeiting of credit cards. In fact, Vancouver is considered to be the North American centre for this activity. However, from recent investigations it's apparent they have diversified into brokering B.C. marijuana for local Vietnamese crime groups, and now facilitate the export of marijuana to the United States. This business is so lucrative that in the past year members of this group have also been setting up their own grow operations.

Also identified within the past year is their involvement in the importation and manufacture of MDMA, which is ecstasy. Heroin has for several years been a commodity imported by this group, both for the local market and for distribution to eastern Canada and the eastern seaboard of the United States.

Vietnamese crime groups are heavily involved in the B.C. marijuana industry as growers, brokers, and dealers. Many of these groups trade marijuana directly for cocaine in the United States, and import the cocaine to traffic at all levels within this province. United States dollars are also accumulated, and it's estimated that several million dollars per month are taken offshore and invested in Vietnam, primarily in real estate.

The effects of enforcement within the past year impacted supplies in the Los Angeles area of the U.S. when specific cells of Vietnamese growers were targeted, in conjunction with the Vancouver Police Department drug squad. As a result of rivalries between different Vietnamese groups over drug trafficking, there have been several homicides and serious assaults over the last number of years.

I'd like to comment on the Outlaw motorcycle gangs. Numerous members of the Outlaw motorcycle gangs are heavily involved in the illicit drug trade, both locally and internationally. Commodities of choice include cocaine, marijuana, MDA, which is speed, and MDMA, or ecstasy. These groups control numerous marijuana growers, both indoor and outdoor, and provide brokerage and exportation expertise for the product.

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We estimate that the Outlaw motorcycle groups and Vietnamese groups together control approximately 85% of the business in British Columbia.

In many instances, marijuana is directly exchanged for cocaine, which is then imported and dealt through the bar and nightclub subculture, at the wholesale level. There's active involvement in the manufacture and trafficking of MDA and MDMA, and also their precursors. The use of ecstasy has been identified in the deaths of two young people recently in Vancouver.

Again, violence is endemic within this group. Numerous homicides and serious assaults, many of which were not officially reported, have taken place over recent years. There are other organized crime groups that have not been specifically identified within this report; however, all are involved, to a large extent, in the illicit drug business, and without exception use profits from B.C. marijuana to further the importation and manufacture of other illegal drugs. These include Eastern European organized crime groups, Indo-Canadian organized crime groups, independent organized crime groups, and traditional organized crime, better known as the Mafia.

The Organized Crime Agency of British Columbia is involved, in partnership with the CCRA, RCMP, Vancouver Police Department, and Delta Police Department, in intelligence gathering and enforcement on the ports. A brief comment, I believe, is relevant on the ports.

The seaports of British Columbia have long been infiltrated by organized crime groups. They are used to facilitate the importation of many types of illicit drugs, the most prominent being cocaine and heroin. This issue is currently being studied by the Senate committee on waterfront organized crime and seaport security.

That's my brief. If the committee has questions, I'll be very pleased to answer. Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Now, from the RCMP, we have Superintendent Carl Busson.

Superintendent Carl Busson (Officer in Charge, Drug Enforcement Branch, Royal Canadian Mounted Police): Thank you, Madam Chair.

I'd like to briefly give you the mandate for the drug enforcement branch. Our mandate is to give highest priority to international and interprovincial organizations involved in the production and distribution of illicit drugs. Investigations at this level always encounter a sophisticated organized crime element that revolves around their illegal drug activities.

The drug enforcement branch also has a drug awareness service. It is responsible for delivering a drug awareness program, with the aim of making communities safe and reducing substance abuse and related problems. The target groups for this strategy are youth, parents, workplaces, and communities.

In a broad view of the drug situation in British Columbia, which is reflective of that of Canada, the drug trade continues to provide the major source of revenue for most organized crime groups. Ecstasy has become a major drug commodity, along with cannabis, heroin, and cocaine. The Canadian illicit drug market has the potential to generate proceeds in excess of $4 billion at the wholesale level and $18 billion at the street level.

Asian-based organized crime groups continue to be heavily involved in the importation of heroin into British Columbia and indeed Canada. There is also intelligence that indicates these same groups are becoming heavily involved in the importation of ecstasy. Outlaw motorcycle gangs continue to be involved in the importation and distribution of cannabis, cocaine, and chemical drugs. In British Columbia, they are also involved in the exportation of cannabis.

On several occasions, organized crime groups have combined their resources to bring drugs into Canada and provide assistance to one another for the laundering of drug proceeds.

There is no reason to believe that legalizing or decriminalizing non-medical drugs would eliminate or reduce organized crime groups. The illegal status of a substance is only a hindrance to criminal organizations. Profit is their motivating factor. We see these groups involved in illegal activities surrounding alcohol and tobacco.

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The other part of our mandate involves the drug awareness service for prevention. This unit gives priority to long-term drug awareness education programs, supported by short-term initiatives. The nationally approved long-term programs are Drug Abuse Resistance Education, more commonly known as DARE; Aboriginal Shield; Drugs and Sports; Drugs and Social Phenomena; and The Winning Solution—Drugs and the Workplace. The nationally approved short-term education programs are “Two Way Street; Parents, Kids and Drugs”, Racing Against Drugs, and PATCH.

The best response to drug abuse lies in the potential of awareness and prevention activities. Only in an environment of reduced supply will prevention activities succeed.

I have highlights from a Manitoba student survey that I would like to share with you. The results of this survey were released in October 2001.

Most students do not condone drinking and driving but are less concerned about using cannabis and driving; 40% of students reported using drugs in the past year, and of those using drugs, 58% do so in cars and 48% use drugs during regular school hours.

The findings point to the need for an expansion of substance abuse prevention efforts and intervention programs. There is a need for effective education in the areas surrounding impaired driving. Risk of being involved in an accident while high are comparable to that of being involved in an accident while impaired by alcohol.

Findings from an Ontario student survey that was conducted between 1991 and 1999 showed the following.

There is a weakening perception of the risk of harm from drugs. There is a weakening wall of disapproval of drug use. Disapproval of cocaine use dropped from 55% to 42%, and the disapproval of regular marijuana use dropped from 61% to 43%. There has been an upswing in drug use since 1993. Heavy drinking and cigarette and cannabis use increased between 10% and 16%, with cannabis showing the highest increase at 16%. Ecstasy use increased from less than 1% to 5%. Use of hallucinogens increased by 11%. Students using four or more drugs increased by 21%. Students not using drugs dropped by 9%.

Several areas where the federal government could assist would be increased funding for drug enforcement units, targeting groups involved in organized crime, for delivering drug awareness programs, and to carry through with proposed amendments to the proceeds of crime legislation.

In closing, I would like to thank you for inviting me here this afternoon and allowing me to make these comments.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Superintendent Busson.

Now, from the Abbotsford Police Department, Chief Constable Ian Mackenzie.

Chief Constable Ian Mackenzie (Abbotsford Police Department): Thank you, Chair. I'd also like to thank you for the opportunity to make a few comments to this committee.

I think the composition of your panel indicates that we're dealing with a complex problem: international aspects; organized crime; and deterioration of large city cores like Vancouver, which Inspector Heed may be talking about. But what I find very useful, and I thank the committee for, is the opportunity to participate in this from the perspective of another size of city. Abbotsford has approximately 120,000 people, and I think it is fairly reflective of the pervasiveness of drug use and some of the social problems that result from non-medical use of drugs. I think it's a very good idea that you look at places other than the large cities, so I commend you for that.

I have given your staff a report that I would simply ask you to read if you have the time, but I won't read through it. There are a few points, though, that perhaps I could highlight.

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I've been a police officer for 25 years, 17 of those years in the Vancouver Police Department. Many of those years were actually spent working in the downtown east side of Vancouver.

When I went out to Abbotsford eight years ago, I was struck by a lot of consistencies and similarities in Abbotsford to what I had seen in Vancouver. True, it was less visual, less obvious, but the same problems associated with drug activity exist in Abbotsford as in Vancouver, and I suggest pretty well in any town and city and the rural areas of this country. I found that an interesting observation. I don't know what I was expecting, but something slightly different, I think.

In Abbotsford, we have an old part of the city, which is called old downtown Abbotsford. Mr. White may have advised you of this, but it is an area where we are experiencing very similar public order concerns to those I experienced as a police officer in the downtown east side of Vancouver—not as extreme but still they are there. We have open drug dealing. We have street prostitution. We have a physical deterioration of part of the city.

I'm not blaming it all on drugs, but there is a relationship to it, in my view. You may hear from certain jurists and academics that there is somehow no relationship between alcohol and drug misuse and crime. I've heard that from some academics; I don't know if you'll hear that or not.

I refer to retired Chief Justice Peter Cory in the Daviault case, who said there is no proven relationship between the use of alcohol and violent crime. I'm paraphrasing, but that's essentially what he said.

I can tell you as a police officer for 25 years, and I think the people sitting with me here would rebut that as well, that there's definitely a correlation between substance abuse and crime.

The police role is fairly simple. We are to prevent crime, enforce the law, and maintain the peace. Police departments throughout the country, even with the advent of community policing, still focus mainly on law enforcement. We see that as a manner in which we can certainly maintain the peace in the streets and perhaps prevent crime, although I think that's somewhat doubtful.

But if you look at places like the downtown area of Abbotsford—and I won't put words into Kash's mouth—but perhaps in the downtown east side of Vancouver you see a lot of police resources applied, and you still see some deterioration in different stages. I think we obviously need to be more comprehensive in our response.

I'm not going to talk about specifics, but I do urge the committee to go and talk to the police officers who are actually out there doing the job. I can speak as a police chief relating to policy and law and the police role within that policy and law.

As I said, if the law of the land is to deal with drugs through criminalization—I may be a little bit radical here, but so be it—then I don't think it has necessarily worked that well. I am not suggesting that there should not be a role for law enforcement in regard to drug trafficking, marijuana growers, organized crime, the things that Superintendent Busson and Deputy Chief Ditchfield have spoken about. Obviously there must be. But when you talk about some of the activity relating to street-level drugs and the peripheral crime that relates to that, I think you have to ask the question, why are people committing crimes to get drugs?

Well, it's obvious. They're addicted. I'm not suggesting anything radical here, I don't think, perhaps a bit from the police perspective, but it seems to me that one should aim at the source of the problem. That means we have to look at aspects like treatment, intervention, and, I would suggest, forced intervention.

If somebody is addicted to a drug—and I'm aware of the civil liberties aspect of it—and they are picked up for drug possession, for example, I suggest it's an opportune time to assist them, if necessary, through the law, to be treated, not voluntarily, because a lot of these people do not have the willpower to be treated voluntarily.

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Experiments, I believe in the mid-1970s, in B.C. to require heroin treatment for heroin addicts I think were found to be unconstitutional. If you want to be aggressive in your response, look at ideas like that.

I think my last comment would be associated with this area, and that is that drug addicts are not by definition immoral and substance abuse is not in itself criminal. Crime evolves around substance abuse, and if a crime occurs the police should deal with it, but I think it would be very wise for us as a society to look at this from a health perspective as much as from a criminal perspective. And that's when you get into areas like treatment and harm reduction. I believe if you talk about harm reduction, which I believe is one of your mandates, you have to be careful to tailor the response to the particular community you're talking about. I think there are enough options in harm reduction and enough research to suggest that harm reduction should be considered as an appropriate strategy to deal with the health aspects that these drug addicts and people who are addicted to alcohol and other substances suffer from.

I've basically said that in my written submission so I'll leave it at that, and if there are any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Mackenzie. I was glancing through your presentation. I think there are some other interesting things in there, and the committee members all have a copy of these presentations today.

Now from the Vancouver Police Department, Inspector Kash Heed.

Inspector Kash Heed (Commanding Officer, Vice/Drugs Section, Vancouver Police Department): Thank you, Madam. I want to make a comment about Chief Mackenzie's remarks.

Often I feel that I'm out there alone in some of the comments I make regarding this, so it's nice to hear someone of this calibre seated beside me making those remarks, which are similar to my remarks. So thank you very much.

Honourable members, I would like to express my thanks for the opportunity to speak to you this afternoon. It may be difficult to ensure my presentation falls within the allotted timeframe of ten minutes given the array of drug issues law enforcement officials are expected to deal with in Vancouver. Nevertheless, I will endeavour to keep my comments concise.

Recently I had an opportunity to appear before the Senate special committee on illegal drugs. Although my comments at that time focused on the cannabis issue, the issue of the non-medical use of drugs was discussed. Hopefully my presentation today won't be as controversial as that particular one was.

Today I will try not to repeat what was discussed unless it is warranted through discussion after my presentation, nor will I reiterate what my colleagues present today, or have said or will say. The aim of this presentation is to highlight the crucial drug issues facing the Vancouver police.

The city of Vancouver is one of the most beautiful and vibrant cities in the world. It is the gateway to the Pacific Rim and is the heart of trade and commerce. Unfortunately, there is a dark side to the city.

As well as being the centre for legitimate trade, Vancouver is also a centre for the illicit drug trade. It is a well-known fact that the hub of the drug trade of this city is the downtown east side. The effects of the rampant drug trade and the accompanying urban decay are dramatic. The drug of choice is increasingly crack or injection cocaine, a drug that requires its hyperactive victims to shoot up 20 or more times a day. To support their habit, drug addicts turn to crime, mainly property crime. To support the drug addicts, drug traffickers amplify their presence, violently competing for territory 24 hours a day. The active street drug market and its clients have forced many of the area's legitimate merchants out, leaving behind closed and boarded up store fronts.

Increased intravenous drug use and needle sharing have contributed to an HIV epidemic, and the number of illicit drug overdose deaths has averaged 147 per year for the last seven years.

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Developing strategies to deal with the use and sale of drugs is a central theme of any plans to revitalize Vancouver's downtown east side. Many argue the criminal justice system does not respond adequately to people who sell drugs or commit crimes to sustain a drug habit. Others suggest that substance abuse is primarily a health issue and should be dealt with by increasing services to those who are addicted to drugs. Fortunately, most critics agree that these issues require either a national, provincial, regional, or community approach, or a combination of these approaches.

Through the Vancouver agreement, there is a willingness for all levels of government to rally together to develop and implement a coordinated, comprehensive framework for action that will address the drug problem in Vancouver. However, challenges exist in clarifying the roles, responsibilities, and funding.

The Vancouver police recognize that many of the people who are addicted to drugs must be dealt with outside of the law enforcement system. There is an increasing consensus by our officers that drug dependency is primarily a health issue rather than a legal issue.

Our officers are afforded a wide margin of discretion on arresting people with addiction problems who are found in possession of small quantities of drugs for personal use. However, these same officers are frustrated with the limited treatment resources and addiction services available.

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Addicts face social, economic, physical, and legal environments unique to their situation. In many cases, when considering a legal option for an addict traditional process models of criminal justice courts, such as the due process model, crime control model, or administrative model, may not be the best processes to use. Ranges of diversion and other alternative options to traditional sentencing should be considered. For example, as an alternative, a medical model could be utilized similar to drug treatment court whereby the addiction is treated through an array of support services.

While Vancouver has a significant drug problem, in reality the problem is regional, national, and international. The drug trade does not recognize boundaries. The profits to be made in the illicit drug industry are so extensive that they are barely dented by large-scale seizures of the product on its way to market. Highly organized criminal enterprises have controlled the drug business for decades. The sheer scale of the drug market and the sophistication of criminal organizations that market illegal drugs are overwhelming to law enforcement agencies. Interventions are required at several enforcement levels to reduce the supply of drugs.

As in many other cities, the foundation for dealing with the substance abuse problem in Vancouver continues to be law enforcement. It has been estimated that 82% of the police budget is spent addressing problems associated in some way with substance abuse. Recently, the mandate of the Vancouver Police Department's drug unit was modified to assist the folks of the Vancouver agreement. Law enforcement efforts are directed to disrupt or suppress the open-air drug markets by relentlessly pursing the drug trafficker. The policies focus drug enforcement resources on people who are making a profit from the sale of drugs, not the addicted user.

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From June to September 2001, 200 traffickers were arrested in the downtown east side. Descriptive statistics compiled on the 200 traffickers revealed the following: the mean age of a trafficker was 31 years—the range was from 14 to 60 years old; 82% were male, 18% female; 45% live in the downtown east side, 32% live elsewhere in the city, and 8% live outside the city; 78% of the traffickers were selling cocaine, 9% marijuana, 6% heroin, 6% cocaine and heroin; 65% were born in North America; 16% were born in Latin America, 7% in Asia; 80% were Canadian citizens, 8% landed immigrants, 7% refugees, and 3% awaiting deportation; 55% of the traffickers were arrested at least twice during the time period; 41% of the traffickers were on a recognizance and 14% on probation at the time of arrest; 63% of the traffickers were on income assistance. The emerging profile of a street drug trafficker revealed by these statistics debunks many of the myths about who the traffickers are.

We are bracing for another drug phenomenon in Vancouver, complete with its own subset of problems. There appears to be a wave of synthetic stimulant abuse in Vancouver. This is evident in the fashionable rave scene and the nightlife in our cities. There have been recent overdose deaths and several large seizures of amphetamine-type stimulants destined for the streets of our city. Clandestine manufacturing of amphetamine-type stimulants takes place throughout the region. Unlike drugs with a botanical starting point, synthetic drugs can be manufactured from chemicals that can be found or produced anywhere in Canada. These drugs do not need to be trafficked over distances required in the production of agricultural drugs. That allows for much larger profit margins.

The physical and health dangers created by this type of production and use far outweigh any current problems facing our community. Our American counterparts advise us that their most pronounced increase in drug abuse has been reported for synthetic drugs. Some futurists predict that agricultural drugs will be outdated, only to be replaced by the highly addictive and dangerous amphetamine-type stimulant.

Trial-supervised injection facilities involve digression from the strict requirements of law. Yet this controversial measure needs to be part of the discourse about harm reduction. The main objective of supervised injection facilities is that they allow intravenous drug users to inject in a safe, hygienic, controlled, and discrete environment rather than in the public. There is vigorous and vocal opposition to the establishment of these facilities, with several arguments suggesting downsides associated with their introduction. One of the most frequently cited objections is that they would be a strong attraction for drug users and traffickers from outside the area, although there is strong evidence to indicate that this hypothesis is false. One way of reducing the possibility of concentrating the population in one area is to establish several facilities in a number of communities.

Despite ongoing debate over the virtues or difficulties of supervised injection facilities, there are very serious health problems associated with intravenous drug use that must be addressed immediately. The spread of disease and death associated with intravenous drug use puts people at risk. It seems odd to have put resources into establishing needle exchanges to reduce the possibility of contracting HIV, hepatitis B and C, and other diseases, and then stop short of providing additional measures to intravenous drug users who are forced to inject in dirty environments such as lanes, seedy rooms, or abandoned buildings.

Let me clarify that there are limits to what the police can do without the support of complementary health services directed toward removing people from the streets and into a continuum of programs that deal with drug addiction. It is important to remember that the establishment of supervised injection facilities are just one of the multi-faceted strategies needed to combat drug use.

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There was strong sentiment expressed in many quarters that something innovative and creative must be done if we are to have any success in tackling what has become an urgent problem. Recognizing the seriousness of the problem, there is growing consensus that more should be done to understand and reduce the demand for drugs. Additionally, supply reduction strategies must be judged by how they affect consumer demand through the decreased availability of drugs. Ultimately, strategies for reducing supply must be balanced with and support strategies for reducing demand. Enforcement strategies need to complement and assist the efforts of health and social agencies. We look forward to collaborating with you to find effective solutions to Vancouver's drug problem.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Inspector Heed.

And now from CCRA, Brian Flagel.

Mr. Brian Flagel (Director, Customs Border Services, Vancouver International Airport District, Canada Customs and Revenue Agency): Madam Chair, I'd like to thank you for the opportunity to speak to this committee.

I know you have heard from other representatives from Canada Customs, and I'm sure they've described the mandate and operating procedures of our agency. So I'll limit my presentation to the customs operations of the Pacific region. Hopefully I can provide some scope and context for your discussion.

The handout, which you have, provides the basic description of the volumetrics and growth patterns of customs work in the Pacific region. As you can see, we have experienced considerable growth in every mode over the past few years. Last year the Pacific region processed approximately 14 million vehicles entering Canada, over 4.5 million air travellers, 5.1 million commercial shipments, and over 1 million marine containers.

Customs is different from the other law enforcement agencies at this table. In addition to our enforcement role, we have a significant role to play in facilitating trade and tourism, and a large portion of our resources are dedicated to those functions.

We are responsible for administering over 70 different acts for over 40 different departments. Some of this activity is trade related. Some of it is criminal regulatory enforcement. All of it is for the protection of the Canadian economy.

When it comes to finding narcotics, we often feel we are looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Fortunately, increased funding through Canada's drug strategy and a focusing of our efforts through our contraband strategy have helped Customs become much better at interdicting drugs. We have also taken resource savings from automation and redirected those resources to contraband interdiction.

Improvement in our automated systems and better access to criminal index systems have allowed us to identify more suspect individuals and shipments. We have also had significant investments in technology—X-ray, ion scan, things like that—that have aided our interdiction efforts.

Partnering efforts such as IBET, which is the international border enforcement team, and with OCA have significantly increased the necessary cross-agency communication and cooperation necessary for drug enforcement success.

Custom's prime role in drug enforcement is interdiction, that is, stop the drugs before they enter the country. Almost all of our drug seizures are what we describe as cold hits. That means there is no prior information on the subject or the shipment. It's a bit of a fallacy that we know a lot about who is actually going to do the importation. We may know who's responsible at the high levels, but who actually brings the drugs in very few people know until the moment it arrives.

We rely exclusively on risk management and targeting to identify high-risk travellers and shipments. The answers the traveller gives a customs officer or the shipping information for the commercial or courier shipment are the indicators that determine the level of search of an individual or shipment.

Customs is a primary screening apparatus for all goods and people entering Canada. In many ways we are jacks of all trades. We work on behalf of many other departments and agencies and our law enforcement partners. The interesting thing that we have found is that the indicators for a person smuggling drugs are the same as for an illegal migrant, a people smuggler, a terrorist, or many other criminals. They all exhibit similar travel patterns, shipping patterns. They even provide the same basic stories under questioning.

The unpredictable nature of customs drug interceptions causes difficulties for our law enforcement partners, who are charged with the responsibility of drug investigations past the port of entry. It is difficult to arrange a controlled delivery in the short period of time before the recipients of the drugs become suspicious. If you don't know they're coming, suddenly Customs has them. The logistics of trying to put an operation together to successfully carry out a controlled delivery are quite immense, and very often time doesn't allow us to have successful controlled deliveries.

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Unlike customs services in many other countries, Canada Customs has no mandate for inland drug enforcement. Internal conspiracies remain one of our most significant concerns. I should explain that by internal conspiracies we mean people who are in positions of trust or in positions of opportunity—inside airports, on the docks—where they can facilitate the smuggling of goods.

Recent legislation, Bill S-23, will correct some of the long-standing problems that Customs has had in terms of dealing with people who have been in contact with persons and goods entering the country. Until recently, it was almost impossible for Customs to search someone who we suspected may have received goods—drugs or other contraband—from, for example, a passenger arriving in Canada.

Bill S-23 also gives us access to API-PNR, which is advanced passenger information, and that will help us in pre-identifying suspect travellers. The new proceeds of crime legislation will similarly enhance our ability to provide a deterrent to drug-related crime and take immediate action that will result in better investigative information for our law enforcement partners.

Canada Customs remains committed to providing protection against the importation of narcotics and other harmful drugs. I believe the recent legislative changes, combined with continuing and perhaps increased funding of our drug interdiction program and increased partnerships, will allow us to continue our success.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

In your slides you presented a lot of information about some of the internal conspiracy and organized crime information, and I'm sure that will prompt some questions.

Gentlemen, thank you very much for your presentations.

We'll now go to the Q and A. I'm just checking the time. Why don't we start with five-minute rounds and see how well we can do? It's always a dream to see if we can get that.

Mr. Randy White: We'll try to get short statements and short answers.

I want to thank you guys for coming in here. You know, a lot of people depend on you to make the difference between a lot of drugs being on our streets and a few.

I wouldn't say the drug strategy was very effective—the drug strategy that's supposed to be in place for this country. In fact, I haven't found anybody yet who says it is effective. I'm not sure how it's going to be.

I want to ask each of you what you think the primary role of the federal government is in this, keeping it relatively short, because I have a couple of other questions.

We're supposed to make recommendations at the end of this exercise to try to get a drug strategy that is effective and makes sense, so if you have a recommendation on what you think would help....

I also want to comment that there is a difference between the members of the police association, oftentimes, and the chiefs of police. I was with the group, Through a Blue Lens, and a number of other policemen out in Abbotsford a couple of weeks ago. Some of them were saying that anybody who would advocate safe shoot-up sites and needle exchanges is misinformed, that it's giving up on the process, and so on.

There are some differences between the guys on the street, I would say, and the guys in the offices. I wonder if you might make a small comment about that too.

So I'm looking for what you think the primary role of a federal policy would be, and if there's a recommendation that would be most important and effective for you, what would it be?

The Chair: Is it okay if we start with you, Inspector Heed, and then we'll just go straight across.

Insp Kash Heed: I just want to make the comment about the members from the group, Through a Blue Lens, our odd squad people. They've done great work in showing us across this nation—and I believe they have an international conference set up for May—the situation we have here, especially in the downtown east side, the problems we have with drug use, drug abuse, whatever term we wish to use.

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I've been an operational police officer over 20 years on the street, five of those directly in the downtown east side as a supervisor. And Ms. Davies, I think we met at that particular time. So my comments are not from someone sitting behind a desk or someone reading academic papers. A lot of mine come from the area I'm most familiar with.

Certainly, getting someone from the street-level addict to a continuum of care, and hopefully to abstinence, is what we want. But we advocate that there are certain processes that individual has to go through. These could be the harm-reduction strategies we're proposing in the Vancouver agreement, or anything else we can come up with that's innovative and will help us with this problem. I'm very open to the suggestion of supervised intravenous facilities, injection facilities—whatever we want to call them—and other harm-reduction strategies that we must look at.

As far as the role of government goes, from my point of view, certainly policy in this area is one. Government has to recognize that areas across Canada—and I'm sure government does—are quite unique. Our situation in Vancouver, especially with the downtown east side, is very unique. I've travelled across Canada, I've travelled across North America, and I haven't seen an area similar to what we're facing across Canada or in North America.

So certainly policy is one area, and probably more direct policy relating to some of our drug issues, whether that's varying laws to assist us or reconsidering some of our drug laws in Canada to allow us to create more of a healthy balance between reducing demand and reducing supply.

I am an advocate of the four pillars approach. I also advocate that the law enforcement pillar is the one police take the lead role in. We take a minor role in the other three pillars—prevention, treatment, and harm reduction. Certainly, we should not be a lead agency in any of those pillars, and we don't expect other institutions in society to be the lead agency in our law enforcement pillar.

Right now, that pillar is lopsided. I'm expending a vast amount of police resources to try to stabilize the problem we have in Vancouver at this point. We have to stabilize it before we can get to some of the community development.

Funding is very critical at this particular time. Whether it be from federal, provincial, or municipal government, funding is needed, not just in law enforcement but also in the other pillars I've identified.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Ditchfield:

D/Chief Peter Ditchfield: Thank you very much.

I think the federal legislation that has been worked on and is currently being worked on regarding organized crime is a step in the right direction. In fact, being able to identify organizations, prosecute them, and have some specific sentences regarding members of organized groups is definitely going in the right way.

What we have to remember with organized crime is these people are in the business of acquiring money and assets, and it seems the ability of police to seize assets and have them forfeited to either the federal or provincial crown is a much slower process than the actual prosecution of a substantive offence. The one side of the investigation may go very, very quickly, while the proceeds of crime side goes very slowly. This causes the police great problems in disclosure when a case is wound up. We would certainly like to see the proceeds of crime legislation...streamlined, I guess would be the best word.

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I think enhanced ability to identify assets and accounts overseas.... We are still running into difficulties with various other areas in the world regarding our homegrown criminals, who very rapidly tend to transfer their assets overseas. I think international cooperation needs to be enhanced. Again, we're moving in the right direction, but it needs to be sped up.

I'm not advocating the incarceration of all drug traffickers, which some people believe may be a good thing. What we do see is that in the United States, when organized crime or significant drug traffickers are caught, there is usually a specified sentence that they're looking at right off the top, and the dealing starts from there. We don't have the ability to make these sorts of deals. It would appear that in the States, the intelligence gathered from the ability to negotiate from quite a large sentence to something more middle of the range definitely develops the intelligence base of agencies down there. There is much more of a willingness to cooperate with the organized criminals who have been caught by the U.S. federal authorities.

I must echo Kash's comments here on funding. These cases that we're involved in are long term, some of them multi-year. They are expensive. If you have police agents involved, it costs many hundreds of thousands of dollars to keep them on the payroll. There are some huge witness protection issues at the end for police to look at.

I don't believe the Canadian public has yet realized that these sorts of cases are tremendously expensive, and as a result, the police resources devoted to them are really quite small. If the authorities were to explore the real costs of cases investigated by federal agencies such as the RCMP and provincial agencies such as ours, they would have a much better understanding of the costs involved and would provide adequate funding.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you, Mr. Ditchfield.

Mr. Mackenzie.

C/Cst Ian Mackenzie: Thank you. I won't repeat what's been said.

Abbotsford runs along the border, so one other aspect that I think the federal government can do is to provide the RCMP and Customs with sufficient funding to do proper border policing. I don't know how many people are on the IBET team for the valley. I don't know if Carl knows. It's clearly not enough. I don't believe it's the role of the municipality to police the international border with the United States. I think the federal government has a responsibility in that regard. We will certainly assist, but that primary role would be with the federal agencies, and I don't think they've been given anywhere near adequate funding to do it. We're asking too much of them and giving them too little in that regard.

The other aspect from the federal perspective, which I just want to emphasize one more time, is that I think the federal government should acknowledge the health aspects of drug addiction. While I understand that constitutionally the provision of health services is a provincial responsibility, we all know about the reduction in transfer payments that the federal government has brought about over the last several years relating to health. I think it needs to reintroduce more funding to the health field so that provinces have sufficient resources to deal with some of the health issues that relate to drug addiction.

The Chair: Thank you. We might have a little debate on CHST payments later, but I hear you.

Officer Busson.

Supt Carl Busson: I think I can echo the comments from Deputy Chief Ditchfield and perhaps just summarize those in a broader category.

Legislation and funding to fight organized crime would be two of the mainstays that would assist the RCMP from a drug enforcement perspective. Also, funding for our drug awareness programs, the prevention aspect of it, would allow us to put those programs into the communities more broadly than they are now.

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With regard to supervised injection sites and anything we have seen along the lines of harm reduction, there's just not enough information to allow us to make an informed decision as to what they could look like. There's potential there, but there are so many unanswered questions right now that it's difficult to commit freely to those.

The Chair: Thank you, Superintendent.

Finally, from the federal government, from CCRA, Mr. Flagel.

Mr. Brian Flagel: Thank you. I'll limit my comments to what I'm familiar with. I won't presume to talk about policing issues or drug injection sites.

From my perspective, I think the most progress could be made with appropriate funding, appropriate resource allocation, that would ensure that interdiction can continue to increase. I have no illusion that we can stop all the drugs coming into Canada. We can't; that's impossible. But each interdiction provides valuable investigative information and helps you move up the drug chain. Unless we're adequately funded to do that, we're going to miss valuable opportunities.

The other area is of course legislation and policy. You could consider expanded roles for agencies, for example, such as Customs.

One of the things that I think is not necessarily very efficient at the moment is that we have to turn over all drugs to the RCMP for prosecution, which means that if we make a small drug seizure at the Vancouver airport, we have to call the RCMP to come in and take over the drugs and take over the case. It's probably not the best use of resources. Things like that could be considered as perhaps small but nonetheless useful gains.

In terms of policy, I think Bill S-23 is a good example of positive legislative change. But I'll be honest; we've been asking for this kind of change for years and years, and it's long overdue. Perhaps a little quicker response to the identified needs of enforcement agencies might provide legislation in time to be able to do more good.

The Chair: Thank you.

You mentioned you didn't want to have to go forward and pass them over to the RCMP. What would you prefer to do, prosecute the cases directly?

Mr. Brian Flagel: Sure. We prosecute on other matters. We could prosecute on drugs as well.

The Chair: Okay. Thank you for that.

Ms. Davies.

Ms. Libby Davies: First of all, thank you very much for coming this afternoon.

Chief Constable Mackenzie, you raised the idea of a forced intervention. I just have to say that I totally disagree with that. It seems to me that it's based on the premise that people are refusing treatment. For most of the drug users I've spoken with, and many people I've spoken with, the issue has really been lack of accessible treatment. So the whole idea of coercion.... I'm sure we could all find one individual who has refused treatment, but I think the vast majority of users at some point over a period of time have tried to get into detox or whatever services are available in very limited ways.

I just wanted to say that. It's a whole debate that we can get into, but to me the issue is to make treatment available on demand. It should be there when people need it, whenever that is.

I wanted to come back to the four-pillar approach. I just wanted to begin with the Vancouver Police Department and Inspector Heed. I do want to recognize that the police department has come an incredible way in terms of this debate that's taken place. It's very easy for police departments to be centred on just law enforcement, because that's obviously your primary mandate, and to not really look at it in any broader perspective.

I think all the people I've talked to within the department, including yourself, have agreed that there's just been a huge change and an expansion of horizons of recognizing all four pillars, including law enforcement. You have reiterated that here today. I just want to say I very much appreciate that.

Since the odd squad was brought up, I do want to talk about one thing that is a little bit of a concern to me. This conference that was mentioned—I have it here; it's called IDEAS—which is being put on by Lynda Bentall in partnership with Drug Free America, I think is actually going in the opposite direction to the Vancouver agreement. This is sort of the American style: zero tolerance. Two members of your department are actually listed as vice-presidents of this conference in May. They've been taking out huge ads. They're against needle exchanges. They're against anything to do with harm reduction. So it's kind of counterproductive.

I guess I'm looking for an assurance that they're not representing the views of the Vancouver Police Department. Apparently they're going to put on a really big show. I guess they're concerned the debate is going towards liberalization and they don't like that. Fair enough; we need to have debate. But I think the job we really have to do is to look at the four pillars and make sure they are being implemented in an appropriate and balanced way.

• 1510

The question I have relates to enforcement. I thought your statistics were just fascinating. I didn't catch them all, but the one that jumped out at me is that 63% of traffickers are on income assistance. Immediately that says to me we're probably looking at a fair number of people who are both dealer-users and trafficker-users. I wondered if you had any further information on that.

It really does raise the question, where do we deploy enforcement? Where is it most effective to deploy it? Although there's some information that shows us the police department has moved away from the user on the street, the fact is a lot of the dealers are users too. I don't know how many; I'm hoping you know that.

Even, if you can, distinguish what you mean between the traffickers and the dealers. If 63% of the traffickers—I think you said 80% or 78% are Canadian citizens—are on welfare, this is really, I think, giving us a different kind of picture. Is that where we should be putting law enforcement? How far up can you go in terms of where the really major trafficking is taking place, on the waterfront, or through organized crime, and so on? Anyway, if you could, just fill that out a bit more.

Insp Kash Heed: Thank you. You've given me a lot.

Let me start with the IDEAS conference and the odd squad. Yes, it's very blurred at this particular time. The members that are on the executive of this society that's been put together to sponsor this particular conference are Vancouver Police members. We are dealing with that to ensure there is no conflict of interest.

To put your mind at ease a bit, they've invited me to present and be one of the speakers. Certainly I've told them that my views may differ from Drug Free America or any of the other keynote speakers they are producing. My presentation will be based on empirical evidence, on research that has been done in this particular area—on the drug issue. If that would put your mind at ease a bit, certainly that will take place.

Concerning enforcement, let me just expand on what I spoke about in my short presentation.

The Vancouver police drug unit, back in 1998, adjusted their mandate to focus on the mid-level dealer operating in this region. When I took over command of the drug unit earlier this year, I seriously had to look at our social order problems in Vancouver, especially the open-air drug markets. The most predominant market was the downtown east side. I had to look at the resources of our uniform officers and how they were being deployed. Clearly there was a void in dealing with the street-level drug traffickers.

So I changed the mandate of the unit, and what we are focusing on right now is anyone making a profit from the sale of drugs. We recognize that several of these dealers are in fact addicted traffickers, if I can use that term.

What we are looking at, and I believe there's an announcement that will come out from the federal and provincial governments very soon, is a drug treatment court in Vancouver. We are giving those addicted traffickers the opportunity to participate in a drug treatment court. Those are the ones we will be focusing on, in hopes that they will take the option available to them. That's how we intend to deal with them.

Statistically, we are not at this time keeping stats on whether there is an addiction problem or not with the person we have arrested. But I can tell you, since I took over command of the drug unit and changed the mandate, the drug unit—our uniform officers are different—has not arrested anyone for possession of drugs in the downtown east side. Our focus is clearly on the trafficker, and we hope to deal with the issue of the addicted trafficker through our drug treatment court.

Ms. Libby Davies: Do you think you could actually, for the record, just briefly describe the criteria you use to distinguish between a dealer and a trafficker? I really don't think it's very clear. We use the terms a lot.

Insp Kash Heed: They're synonymous.

Ms. Libby Davies: So you don't actually—

Insp Kash Heed: No.

Ms. Libby Davies: I always think of a dealer as someone who is doing the dealing on the street, whereas a trafficker is someone who is involved at a higher level.

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Insp Kash Heed: No. We use the terms “street level” and “mid-level” to describe the trafficker.

What we have decided we are going to do is focus on the street-level trafficker; the statistics I gave you are for the street-level traffickers. Then we will, at a time we feel is appropriate, move it up to the next level—or, if there is something we can do then with arresting that individual, we will move it up to the next level.

Ms. Libby Davies: Are you saying, then, that now there are currently minimal or no resources focused at high-level trafficking?

Insp Kash Heed: From the Vancouver Police Department, depending on the particular project, we do partner with other agencies, such as the RCMP and the Organized Crime Agency, to go after the upper levels of the drug trade.

Ms. Libby Davies: I guess my concern is that it seems almost a useless and futile use of resources to focus on the street-level dealing and trafficking, because many of them are users. You just get into, again, this revolving cycle. I don't know how much of the police department resources are focused there, but when I spoke to the chief a couple of years ago, he gave me information about the amount of resources required when you actually do make a charge—to actually follow it up through the court system.

I mean, you've got the one officer on the street charging someone, but what's required in terms of infrastructure to follow that up is incredible, in terms of court time, shift work involved, filing reports, all the rest of it.

I just really question...I think enforcement is a part of the strategy, but where that enforcement goes is such a critical question. It always seems to be at the lower end, doesn't it? You can scoop people off the street forever, but we won't have dealt with the problem at all.

Insp Kash Heed: I agree. However, let me just give you the scenario we operate in. We've had debate at this table on what our strategies should be. I'm one who is not chasing the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow; I'm not always going after the mother ship. But it has happened that we've used our resources for two weeks, where I'll have an entire crew working on a kilo of cocaine out of a warehouse in Richmond—with no arrest.

Meanwhile, five to six kilos of cocaine have gone through the downtown east side. So what I've done is take the resources we'd normally use to go after that other level and put them back in the downtown east side. That's the area we must concentrate on right now.

We're hoping that at one point we will be able to move it up to those other levels of traffickers or dealers who are operating in our communities. But at this time there are so many crimes—violent crimes—being committed in the downtown east side because of our street-level traffickers competing for territory that we have to deal with it.

In order for us to streamline the system, we are working hand in glove with our crown prosecutors here in the city to strategically look at recognizance or sentencing for the people we have arrested. We want them to be familiar with the problems we are facing at the street level even before we go to the next level.

So certainly we're moving the focus from someone for possession of drugs and moving it to someone who's trafficking in drugs as one step. We hope to move it a few more steps over the next little while. But we had to start back at the street level.

Ms. Libby Davies: Do I have more time?

The Chair: No, you're actually at 13 minutes.

Ms. Libby Davies: Oh.

The Chair: Thank you. But if there are questions committee members want our panellists to answer, we could certainly invite them to answer. We can get them a list of questions, if that's helpful to people.

Mr. Leblanc.

Mr. Dominic LeBlanc (Beauséjour—Petitcodiac, Lib.): Thank you, Madam Chairman.

Thank you, gentlemen, for very interesting presentations. I think it was my colleague, Randy, who said the interesting thing is to recognize that if it's harm reduction or a drug strategy in different communities, it can apply differently. Chief Mackenzie said it well, talking about Abbotsford and some of the differences Inspector Heed will have in Vancouver.

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I come from rural New Brunswick, so this debate in British Columbia, and certainly in Vancouver, has to some extent fueled the national discussion. For me, though, it has been media reports and a discussion around this committee table more than a daily battle that you're in and that some of my colleagues see.

This brings me to a question. Eventually, this committee will have to, as Mr. White said, write a report that will make recommendations to Parliament, and you have different members of the committee from different parts of the country. Hopefully, we'll get to different parts of the country as well. We've been to Quebec, and this is our second trip, because it's important to be out west and in this city particularly.

A number of you have talked about harm-reduction measures. Inspector Heed talked about harm reduction and Chief Mackenzie as well. You talked about the four pillars. The law enforcement pillar in many ways, in the coffee shops or in the wards of my community, is the one that people are most interested in. Academic papers don't mean as much to them as a senior police officer, a law enforcement official, saying “This is what I think will make a difference”. In many ways, it's a reaction they have. So your opinions carry great weight in the minds of some of these people who aren't well educated as to the context of the problem and don't understand some of the particular factors of this community.

How would you explain to them, from a law enforcement perspective, the value that some of you see in a harm-reduction strategy, including safe injection sites? On an intellectual level, I think there's a lot of merit in that, personally, but how would you explain that to a fisherman on a wharf in New Brunswick who thinks this stuff is illegal and wants to know how come police are saying you should have a site where you can go and inject these drugs? I'd have trouble making the bridge in his mind from the reality you deal with every day to the reality of his community in another part of the country. In layman's terms, how would you try to convince him that there's merit in trying this? I'm asking for some advice or some suggestions.

The Chair: I'm not sure everyone wants to tackle this because I'm not sure everyone agrees with safe injection sites. Should I go to Officer Mackenzie?

C/Cst Ian Mackenzie: I'll make a comment or two. I would explain that...perhaps not the safe injection sites. That's a real dilemma because it's a real contradiction. But to talk about some of the other aspects, treatment facilities and the harm-reduction aspects to that, I think it's essentially problem solving. It goes back to the comment I made in my written submission. What is the reason for a person committing this petty crime or robbing the convenience store, or whatever? If it's to fuel the addiction.... It's like the old saying about...you've probably heard of the babies floating down the river and people are pulling the babies out. Somebody finally says, let's go up to the source of the problem, the person throwing the babies in the river.

You need to go to the source of the problem. How do you do that? You need to have a window of opportunity to deal with those people. That's what I'm saying with things like methadone maintenance or other types of harm reduction, it gives us an opportunity. I would argue, with respect, that perhaps on occasion, not always, you might need to force that opportunity, to intervene and to assist those people to at least manage their addiction. I think it's a sort of problem-solving approach.

The Chair: Mr. Heed, did you want to speak? Did anyone else want to comment?

Insp Kash Heed: I think probably the simplest way to convince them is to give them a tour of the downtown east side. I'm sure they'll be convinced; they'll realize that this is a health issue. Certainly, addiction...I'm certain people out your way know how addictive tobacco and alcohol can be, and how difficult it is to fight that addiction or go to abstinence, from tobacco especially. I'm sure if you could equate it with that, just to describe the people who have a serious addiction, especially with heroin, cocaine, and other drugs we've talked about, that's certainly something that should be convincing.

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The death and disease is phenomenal, I think. In Vancouver, recently, we've had a reduction in overdose deaths in the downtown east side. I don't know if that's attributable to our improved emergency health response or not, or whether we have had some success.

I do understand. I hear it from my own family members, saying we should lock these people up. But I think once we start to educate society and the public as to the failures of locking up or warehousing our problems, we certainly will be better off. There has to be discussion across Canada regarding this issue, so people from your riding do understand what we face here in Vancouver.

The Chair: Thank you.

Mr. Dominic LeBlanc: Can I have one question, Madam Chair?

We've seen in the media recently discussions about increased U.S. border security. Now they're talking about a National Guard presence at borders. I'm wondering if any of you have any comments on what that might mean in terms of the flow of illicit drugs. I appreciate it's early—some of this stuff has just been in the media—but an increased presence of U.S. law enforcement people or National Guards, albeit a temporary measure at the border...do you see that as something that will have an impact?

The Chair: Mr. Flagel.

Mr. Brian Flagel: I think it's very difficult to answer that question. It's an interesting phenomenon that just after September 11, drug seizures dropped. Nobody was smuggling drugs for a while, and it's simply because of the perception that there was a lot more security. I think things are probably almost back to normal in the drug-smuggling world a couple of months later.

I'm not familiar with how the Americans are going to deploy their people on the border. Certainly, there are thousands of miles of areas where you can cross into the United States, and it's very difficult to defend against that. I think the persistence of drug smugglers will continue to suggest that they'll keep smuggling, particularly the B.C. bud into the United States. They're going to continue to walk it across the border, I would think.

D/Chief Peter Ditchfield: I would add to that too. I agree with what Brian said. We definitely saw a decrease after September 11, but they're right back to it. I think they'll continue because there are such fast profits involved. However, the added enforcement activities on the border will probably result in increased interdictions and will probably add to the intelligence picture. That's about all.

Insp Kash Heed: I'd like to make a comment regarding that. Since September 11 and the increased security at our borders—and I understand there may be even more increased security from the American side—in Vancouver, especially the downtown east side, we have not seen any difference in the quantity of drugs down there, the quality or the price of drugs. I'm talking cocaine, heroin, marijuana. As a matter of fact, as I mentioned, we've seen an increase in amphetamine-type stimulants in Vancouver.

Certainly, at the higher level there may be some interdictions, some successes there in stopping the drugs coming across our unprotected border—our now somewhat protected border. However, I have to look at the quantity that's available to our addicted user, and it has certainly not made any difference at the street level.

The Chair: One final question. Mr. Flagel, is there the same kind of coordinated intelligence unit here in the Vancouver area that there is in Montreal?

Mr. Brian Flagel: I'm not familiar with what Montreal has.

The Chair: Okay, in terms of CCRA?

Mr. Brian Flagel: We do have our own intelligence unit. We are linked on an ongoing and a project basis with OCA, so it's probably very similar, I would suspect.

The Chair: Okay.

Mr. Randy White: Madam Chair, I want to make a very short comment on something that was brought up here.

The Chair: Okay, very short.

Mr. Randy White: It's okay to my mind—it's healthy, in fact—for organizations, whether it's the odd squad or policemen or anybody else in this country, to have a view that's contrary to something called harm reduction. I have one myself, and I don't think we should expect all policemen in this country to go along with whatever convention somebody up there decides is a good idea.

• 1530

Ms. Libby Davies: [Inaudible—Editor]...the department, because it's going completely against the Vancouver agreement, which a lot of people signed onto.

The Chair: Okay.

That will bring this round to a close.

Gentlemen, if you have any further information to impart to us—certainly, Deputy Chief Ditchfield, I know you may have some things—or if there's a need to have an in camera meeting at some point, we'd be happy to hear from you. We appreciate all of you coming to us today and giving us the benefit of your advice and experience.

For all committee members, just before I suspend for a couple of minutes, we have a sound check happening in the room next door starting at 5 o'clock, so we're going to whip into the next session as fast as we can and try to get through as much as possible, because I gather we're not going to be able to hear much at about 5.

So I'll suspend for a few minutes. Thank you.

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• 1542

The Chair: I'll call this meeting back to order. We're very pleased to have with us today from the RCMP, Chuck Doucette, who is the provincial coordinator for drug awareness services; from the John Howard Society of the Lower Mainland, Larry Howett, who's the spokesperson for a program, I gather, called Choices; and we have from Seaview Addiction Services Society, Donna Baird, executive director; from the Alcohol-Drug Education Services we have Art Steinmann, who is the executive director; and from Pacifica Treatment Centre we have Kathy Oxner, also an executive director.

I'll start with you, Staff Sergeant Chuck Doucette.

Staff Sergeant Chuck Doucette (Provincial Coordinator, Drug Awareness Services, “E” Division, Royal Canadian Mounted Police): Thank you.

Basically, I wanted to start by reviewing some of the basic principles that are in the present Canada drug strategy. If we look at the long-term goal, it's to reduce harm associated with alcohol and other drugs to individuals, families, and communities, through prevention, treatment, and enforcement. That a balance between supply reduction and demand reduction is needed is one of the basic principles, and I want us to think about the need for that balance.

Prevention is considered to be the most cost-effective, it mentions in there. It also mentions that a variety of multi-sectoral partnerships is key; programs and policies that have a sensitivity to gender, culture, and life stage, and involvement of the target group; prevention treatment and rehab programs must be considered; the determinants of health must be considered. It says a legislative framework is necessary, and it says supply reduction to target the upper echelons of criminal organizations. So that's the basis on which Canada's drug strategy was formed, or the framework.

Thinking about that, we'll look at what we actually have, our current situation. We did have, after 1987, with the Canada drug strategy, a steady decline in drug use for a number of years, particularly from about 1983 to 1994. But since that period, since about 1993-94, we have had a fairly significant increase in the use of drugs by young people in particular.

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We now find ourselves in a situation where drugs are more potent. No matter what drug you're talking about on the streets, it's more potent than it was ten years ago or more. In particular, the THC content in marijuana is in the high teens if not twenties compared to low-grade marijuana. It's easier to obtain. We now have more intravenous drug use than we have had before, which has led us to concerns about HIV and hepatitis and other diseases that draw a fair amount of attention. And we have the police estimating that about 80% of our calls for service are directly related to substance abuse.

So when you think about those concerns, the next thing I would like you to think about is what some of the contributing factors that led us to where we are might be. As people who are responsible for primary prevention, one of the first things we noticed is that there has been a steady reduction in the funding available for primary prevention throughout Canada. Therefore, when you talked about one of the principles being a balance between demand reduction and supply reduction, certainly the demand reduction side of things has slowly slipped away and has gotten less over the years.

At the same time, there have been no increases for the enforcement or the supply reduction side. Had there been a significant increase in resources there, perhaps it could counter the slipping dollars for the demand reduction side. But there has been no increase there, and yet there has been a decrease in demand reduction.

One of the principles is the need for multi-sectoral partnerships, and yet you see very few of those actually in effect. In fact, it's interesting that we now talk about the success of what's called the Vancouver agreement, which is an agreement between the three levels of government to work on what's happening in Vancouver. But what's very unfortunate about that is the need to have something special called the Vancouver agreement in order to have the three levels of government actually working together towards that. When you look at Canada's drug strategy, it sounds like a given that this is happening throughout the country, and yet it obviously is not or we would not have the need for something called the Vancouver agreement.

There have been insufficient resources for treatment. We're hearing continually the stories of lineups for people who are trying to find treatment and can't. At the same time, we have an increase in funding for organizations promoting policy reform and/or legalization. This has created a lot of mixed messages and misinformation available to the young people in particular, who are hearing from organizations that if we just legalize drugs, the problems would go away, and things like “Marijuana really doesn't hurt you; it's actually an excellent medicine.” Young people are confused about the messages they're hearing.

We also have the public attitude among mainly us baby boomers, who have now an increased social acceptance for drug use and are not necessarily sending the same kinds of anti-drug messages to our children as our parents did to us when we were younger.

As a result of the inadequate prevention, treatment, and enforcement over the last few years, we now have more emphasis on harm reduction. To me, harm reduction is something we do to lessen the harm to individuals who are using drugs, and that's part of Canada's drug strategy. In other words, when prevention, treatment, and enforcement have failed, the fact that we are now seeing an increased emphasis on the need for harm reduction is an indication of that failure of the other three.

We must now be very cautious not to increase harm reduction measures at the expense of prevention, treatment, and enforcement, or we will see an even further reduction in the effectiveness of these three measures and an even greater need for more harm reduction. We'll have created a never-ending cycle, spiralling downwards, of substance abuse.

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So what do we do now? Does this mean our drug strategy is not based on sound principles because it hasn't been working? It is my belief that these principles are sound. However, I think we must take a very serious look at our commitment to them. We should avoid the phrase “the war on drugs has failed” that we hear coming from the United States. To use that phrase would imply that we actually had a war on drugs in Canada.

This to me would mean that we had a strong national leader leading a very coordinated effort with a true commitment from all three levels of government to provide adequate resources for each of the seven components included in the framework of Canada's drug strategy. I think we must start off by recognizing that this has never happened in Canada. Rather than a fleet of ships fighting in a coordinated battle under the leadership of an experienced admiral, we have had only a flurry of small skirmishes by a number of small boats that are competing for ammunition and for best vantage point.

Instead of falling victim to this ploy by the drug legalizers and giving up on our strategy, we should first take a look at what we could do to improve the chances for it to work. Prevention does work. We know that prevention works because we have seen it in other areas. If you look at the drinking and driving campaigns, the campaigns to get people to wear seat belts and to stop smoking, these are examples of successful prevention campaigns. Every time I see commercials on TV and some of the other efforts in that area, I wonder why we don't see the same kind of thing aimed at substance abuse prevention. We have never had that kind of a coordinated effort.

In the RCMP we believe in the need to teach the basic skills to resist drugs and violence in our schools. These skills have to be taught in elementary school and then reinforced in middle school and again in high school. We also believe that the police should be involved in teaching these skills in partnership with the schools, the parents, and the community.

We have drug-awareness officers in every province. We have different programs aimed at different audiences, some for youths, some for adults. However, there are vast differences in the resources allocated for demand reduction in each province. In most provinces, except British Columbia, we have only one or two federal positions dedicated to drug awareness. This is a very small number compared to the resources dedicated to enforcement. Again, I'm speaking of that need for a balance.

In this province we have 12 federal and 6 provincial resources dedicated to drug awareness, for a total of 18. That is still not nearly enough. To become more effective we have started to teach the drug awareness resistance education, or DARE, program. Our drug awareness coordinators are used to coordinate the training, the funding, and the implementation of the DARE program throughout the province, while at the same time the program is delivered by the local police, be that RCMP or other municipal police departments. But we have now increased the level of people who are committed to drug awareness in this province by implementing the DARE, so that we now have over 300 trained DARE officers. It is a significant increase in resources dedicated to doing primary prevention of substance abuse and violence.

As the demand for DARE increases, we continue to train more police officers to become DARE officers. The DARE officer training is an intensive two-week course requiring the candidate to stay at the training site for the duration of the course. Presently the funding for this training is paid for by donations from the community groups or corporate sponsorship.

Because there is no government funding for this, we have also had to form a non-profit society called DARE B.C. to help raise the necessary funds. It should be noted, though, that a significant amount of money has come from DARE International, which is based in the United States, to help us train DARE officers in Canada. This will continue until we have the ability to raise enough funds within Canada for this purpose.

In conclusion, for the first time in years we can say that there has been an increase in resources dedicated to primary prevention of substance abuse and violence. It will take a few years at this rate to make a significant impact, but at least we have started. What we need is a revised plan from our federal leaders to show their commitment to reducing substance abuse and the related problems. Hopefully this leadership will help the other two levels of government to better coordinate their efforts in this regard as well. There is no doubt in my mind that the principles in Canada's drug strategy can work. We just have to learn to apply them more effectively.

Thank you.

• 1555

The Chair: Thank you, Staff Sergeant.

Now, from the John Howard Society, we have Larry Howett.

Mr. Larry Howett (Spokesperson, Choices, John Howard Society of the Lower Mainland): Good afternoon.

I want to talk about what I face on an almost daily basis in terms of my dealings with youth, offenders—offenders still in prison and offenders just out of prison—and the public in general. I go into schools and other public institutions and I talk to people. I go to public forums on the four-pillar strategy, as it's called, of Vancouver.

Yes, I was surprised that it took a civic government to get that off the ground and moving. Mr. MacPherson, goes into community settings and talks to people and tries to educate them into understanding what that strategy is all about. The strategy includes prevention, education, and all those things everybody agrees are important with respect to us, our children, the future, and what we're going to do in this country towards dealing with the problem of drugs. I found it unacceptable that it had to come from a civic government. It was them, on their own, who had to get help from other agencies and from other focuses of government. But I'm glad they were there, and I share their concerns, as I'm sure everybody in this room does.

What do I find when I go to those meetings? I find a lot of scared people. I agree with Mr. Doucette here that drugs have never been cheaper. They've never been more pure, and the situation has never been more dangerous. Now, I've heard that things are different in different parts of Canada. I agree, and Vancouver, where I live, is where I have to deal with this problem. That's the perspective I live with, and we're the people who try to deal with the problems.

It's a blizzard here, and addiction is a disease different models have been tried on over the years. Some say, well, let's lock them up. That was a big model for years and years. We locked them up and nothing happened. They'd just do their time, get out, and go back to using drugs. They don't stop using drugs in prison, either, because there are lots of drugs in prison. It's just one big, endless circle of addiction, prison, expense, and money.

Everybody says, well, we can throw more money at the problem, or we can ignore it. What we need to do is have some control over the problem initiated from a central focus and a central source. It's not right that a community should have to lead the charge. The federal government, I believe, is the government that ought to lead the charge and be in charge. It ought to have some kind of ombudsman to oversee all the different overlapping jurisdictions that have to be employed if we're going to successfully fight this problem. I've always believed that.

When I go to meetings in community centres, I'm surprised at some of the reactions I find from the grassroots people in Vancouver. I find that people are pretty much fed up with the “nothing works” attitude. They're scared because their children are the ones who can't walk by a Sky Train station without somebody offering to sell them drugs.

I go into schools and talk to children, and imagine this. In a place like Langley, British Columbia—which I thought was a pretty middle-of-the-road kind of community—I talked to a 13-year-old girl in an alternate school who was a year into recovery from cocaine addiction. I never knew what alternate schools were until a year ago. I didn't even know they existed, but do you know what? They're everywhere now. A lot of the kids who are in those alternate schools are kids who have problems, and a lot of those problems are associated with drugs. When I see 13-year-old children a year into recovery for cocaine addiction and for hard drugs, then I know that it's far past the time for talking. It's time for action. It's time for people to get involved.

Maybe five or six years ago in Matsqui Institution there was a guy who did tattoos. He had hepatitis. They offered all the prisoners a test for hepatitis to see who had hep C. Two out of three men had hep C in there—two out of three. Do you know what it is now? It's risen to 93% over that five- or six-year period. That's what happened. Nobody can claim that they didn't know. Everybody knew. What happened?

Is the answer to give them needles? I don't think many people want to seriously entertain that notion because the guards will say it can be used as some type of weapon. What is the answer? More programs? Every third program in prison now deals with drugs, but they don't stop people from using drugs.

• 1600

I have found there is a certain amount of sympathy at the meetings on the part of the average Joe on the street—in Vancouver, British Columbia, anyway—for some focus using a medical model and for at least opening a dialogue with a view to setting up an experimental heroin maintenance program. That's one of the solutions that's been offered, but it hasn't been tried. It's been tried elsewhere, in other countries, with some measure of success. Mind you, it's not going to be cheap if we decide to go down that road.

In Switzerland there are only 1,000 addicts, 300 or 400 of them on heroin. Here, there are 15,000 in Vancouver, and we know that none of those programs work without adequate support to go along with them. Addicts don't go downhill just because of their addiction; they learn lots of other bad habits—criminal habits. They can't find work because their entire life is a job of supporting their addiction.

We have to look at the overall cost, and the overall cost of this in larger terms, in a larger framework, involves health care. Health care is something the federal government ought to be involved in, and I think the harm reduction model in terms of health care speaks for itself.

What does it cost to treat a person with HIV? What does it cost to treat a person for hepatitis C for life? A lot of money. And what does it cost to keep him in prison? It's just that we can spend money endlessly doing that, having them come back out, use drugs again, and go back in so we can spend another $50,000 or $60,000 a year to keep him in prison. Or we can focus that money on some types of problems, spending it on prevention and programs that deal with things.

Do you know that when I go into a YDC and talk to children, there's nothing in there for kids and for addiction treatment? Basically nothing. At least in federal and provincial institutions they have methadone for addicts. They don't for the kids. This is when they're young and addicted, when some kind of intervention would help.

I'm not advocating giving methadone to kids. I say that's a last resort for any addict. However, I think it is absolutely essential that we start looking at some of these problems with the view that yes, we're going to have to spend money on them. That's just a fact. If we don't start focusing on where we're going to spend that money and how we're going to spend that money and come up with a workable program instead of a lot of different government levels talking about it, we're not going to find any way to deal with it. It's just going to get worse.

The four-pillar strategy is as good a place as I know to start. I would suggest that everybody in this room have a really good hard look at that strategy.

In terms of harm reduction, we can demonize and criminalize addiction to death, just as we've done for the last 50 years, and all that will happen is that 300 or 400 more addicts will die next year of overdoses. That's the bottom line, and that's what we're dealing with here: people's lives and the way people have to live those lives.

It's no longer a downtown east side problem. People die of overdoses everywhere, not just on the downtown east side. In every community I go to I have to deal with 13-year-olds, talk to them, and wonder why it is that I have to try to help children hooked on hard drugs.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Howett.

Now I'll turn to Donna Baird from Seaview Addictions Services.

Ms. Donna Baird (Executive Director, Seaview Addictions Services Society): I hope to be as organized as some of the other speakers. I have written down several points.

Being someone who trained in the States to become an addiction specialist, I need to speak on that point, that is, the standardization of qualifications of people in the field. In order to get the qualifications I have, I had to go to the States. It wasn't offered here.

I'm finding that in the field, as I work with other professionals, there are as many different definitions of addiction as there are people. When you're working with that many definitions, it's very difficult to address the problem.

You have people who come in the door, and if you have somebody working in the field who has an addiction problem themselves, maybe they're going to define the person sitting in front of them as not fitting their criteria in order to defend their own situation. It's a pretty damaged field, and we're living in a pretty damaged society.

I think one of the things we don't address much is the family unit. We have a lack of integrity in the family unit.

I work in West Van. I have worked from downtown with the street people right up to a very upper-class environment. Addiction is addiction, and it doesn't matter where it is. However, the resources to maintain the problem are a lot easier to get in West Vancouver. They have the money. They are also perpetuating the problem by leaving the house at 7 o'clock in the morning, giving their kids cell phones, cars, and money to go for the rest of the day, until 9 o'clock when they get home and when it's maybe an hour before they go to bed. We're not putting a lot of emphasis on the integrity of the family. I think that's one of the core problems. If prevention is going to look at something, I hope prevention looks at the family unit.

• 1605

We don't have a continuum of care. We have a lot of stand-alone facilities here in Vancouver. Again, coming from the States, where I worked for a number of years, I found it difficult to come back to Canada. It seems as if I took a step back in time—about 20 years. People are very territorial. We're competing for the same dollars. There isn't a sharing of services.

There's almost an inherent problem in setting people up with the RFP, the request for proposals process, where you have agencies that are sister agencies competing for the same dollars. There becomes this adversarial relationship instead of this blending of services. I find it difficult to have somebody come into our facility, where we have 11 programs ranging from in-home detox methadone right up to seniors' programs, and say they're going to come here for one part of the service, go somewhere else for another part of the service, come back here for maybe the end part of the service, and maybe be referred out for life skills, or something else. There's a real lack of continuum of care.

There's also a lack of paperwork that follows these people. If anybody knows the nature of addiction, there's a great deal of denial awareness. The brain has been hijacked. You're no longer working with the core person whom you may have known many years prior. When you don't have paperwork following these people, they're able to recreate this story of denial that's very difficult to break. It has been a problem.

I also have down here poor sharing of resources. There's a real crossover with other resources such as the Canadian Mental Health Association, some of the transition housing. You have common themes here. Yet we have stand-alone facilities. Instead of having under one umbrella a continuum where someone could walk in the door and either be plugged into detox, transition housing where they access the home detox model, which is very cost effective, go to outpatient counselling, or what have you.... You can share a lot of resources for a lot less dollars than you're replicating right now with a lot of stand-alone facilities.

Another thing is we look at addiction as more on the physiological level, and addiction is addiction. I have kids coming in with eating disorders who are turned on to cocaine as a way of managing their weight. They have an eating disorder that is as problematic as their cocaine problem. We're treating the cocaine problem. We don't have people who are trained truly in addiction to treat the issue at its core. Again, we look at physiologically what the cost is and what the cost is maybe to society, but we hush-hush when it comes to talking about the spiritual solutions in people's lives and what connects us to one another.

The existence of Internet addiction cyber sex.... We have clients coming in with cyber sex addictions. We have people coming in with shoplifting addictions. Although they are different types, the dynamics are the same. The consequences that contribute to the classification of addiction are similar with the families, the social, the money, and so on. Because we're mandated to treat substance abuse or gambling problems, there are no dollars to actually treat concurrent addictions or maybe addictions that are going to be the gateway to other things in order to access services. I had one person who had a problem with cyber sex and said he came in telling people he was addicted to cocaine so he could get some counselling. There are some holes there.

There is poor training for physicians, social workers, counsellors. We're not giving consistent messages to clients, to the community. We don't have the training resources to give people a common understanding. We started a UBC School of Medicine program to give physicians some training. But our dollars were limited, so there was only so much we could do.

On accessing our counterparts...in different countries it's a requirement that if alcohol is going to be advertised on TV or there are smoking ads, campaigns, sleeping aids, the pharmaceuticals, etc., it's dollar for dollar in prevention. If they're going to put in a dollar of advertising, then they need to put a dollar into prevention. That's something we don't do here. I don't even know the veins of communication where we could access that. But it's a smart idea. There's money in it.

A centre for excellence—for many years we've talked about having a commission, because we cross every ministry with the problem of addiction. It's interesting that since returning to Canada in the last eight years, I think I've seen six ministry changes. The cost involved in that.... Number one, it seems like nobody wants us. I think that is also the lack of understanding, and it's costly. It's a costly resource.

• 1610

If I can be petty, even the cost in letterhead, paper, business cards, and things like that—we're looking at millions of dollars when we tack on the word “services” to Ministry of Health or Ministry of Children and Family Development. Those are dollars that I often think, why are we spending them on this when we could be spending them on services?

I watch television. I've taught a course on the messages of advertising to kids in elementary school, to teach them that 90% of advertising is geared toward youth. We have lots of issues out there about body image and other potentially addictive behaviour. We've normalized a certain level of dysfunctional use. I admire ICBC for putting out their campaigns on “Don't drink and drive”. Yet at the same time, we give a message that it's okay to go out and party. We're not looking at the kids the next morning who are dealing with parents who are hung over and not feeding them, or who are not getting out of bed, or who are calling into work sick. We're normalising a certain level of dysfunctional addiction here.

I put down accountability and spending. Again, we lack the holistic treatment of addiction. Included in what I see as solutions is money into prevention—dollar for dollar. For whatever is going into creating the problem we should look at putting money back into prevention or treatment. I find it difficult having a gambling treatment program where we have to access gambling dollars. We have to put on casinos to get those gambling dollars or what have you. The good news is they made it a step beyond having to run casinos. We can access the gaming dollars. The only way I can justify it is to say, I'm putting it back into prevention.

A shared facility where we can access mental health, medical transition housing, detox, out-patient counselling, and residential is cost effective. It's a continuum of care. It's a one-stop shop. You're not paying for replication in management as well as staffing and services. It also decreases the competition for dollars.

Advertising—with methadone we have a user fee, and there is some built-in accountability. Can we look at some kind of user fee for some services?

The Chair: Thank you very much, Ms. Baird.

Mr. Steinmann.

Mr. Art Steinmann (Executive Director, Alcohol-Drug Education Services): Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity to be here.

I'm representing the Alcohol-Drug Education Service. I've had a chance to talk to Libby over the years and have had some good discussions—sometimes agreeing, sometimes not.

Randy, I've been in your office and discussed our programs with you. So we've had a little bit of contact.

To the others, it's a great opportunity for us to be here. We did send a little package around in a blue folder. I encourage you to look at that when you have a chance. I will give you a written submission of some of my comments. It's here in draft form, and I'm going to highlight a few points as we go along.

I'm speaking today as someone who has worked for over 20 years in alcohol and drug prevention and education, the last 17 years at this agency I'm with now, Alcohol-Drug Education Service, which has a long history—50 years, a longer history than I do—in working and trying to address this topic. Recently we've had the opportunity to present to the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs and the Prime Minister's caucus task force on urban issues. We've also been very involved with the provincial addictions group and with the mayor's coalition. I'm an honorary member of the BCMA committee and so on. So it goes.

I'm saying that just to point out the range of experience we've had on this issue. I'm also trained as a high school teacher, although I started working in drug education right from the get-go and have been involved ever since. I've really dedicated my life to researching and developing and evaluating and implementing prevention strategies and programs. I speak as a parent and a person who lives and works in the east side of Vancouver, and someone who is very concerned, obviously, as we all are.

• 1615

The drug problem, as I have seen it over the years, is first and foremost a people issue. Different drugs come and go. I commend you for your mandate of looking at the underlying causes. I would suggest to you that to the degree that we can help young people develop a sense of meaning and purpose, have a sense of options, and have some skills and some support, those people will gravitate toward healthier choices. So a lot of what we're involved in is trying to prepare people to navigate through a drug-saturated culture and to come out with as few problems as possible.

Obviously, kids who come from homes where there is abuse of any variety, such as major trauma, severe pressures—whether it's poverty or education—addiction, or substance abuse are at high risk. One of the things that is needed is specialized approaches for high-risk kids, and not nearly enough is being done on that.

We've noticed tremendous changes in drug use patterns over the years. Others have alluded to that. I won't say a lot more, except to add that because cocaine and heroin are smoked readily now, the progression from smoking tobacco or marijuana to using cocaine and heroin is not a big step in many instances. The level of marijuana use has gone up significantly. It's now the second most widely used drug. Alcohol is the first, then marijuana, and then tobacco.

That concerns me, because 15 years ago we had a very different situation, and we were making progress. The feds and the provinces were funding community action programs at the local level throughout the provinces, and groups that were concerned were meeting and implementing initiatives in their little areas. As has been referred to, the amount of drug use levelled off and declined. But that has all changed. I really feel it's due in large part to us stopping funding and supporting a systematic, coordinated, and comprehensive approach to this problem, led by prevention, because that is where you stand a chance of preventing new people from becoming addicts.

Even if we had all the harm reduction and treatment and enforcement we need, I think at best we would manage the problem. I don't know that we would reduce it significantly.

Prevention is absolutely pivotal as one part of the equation. It's not the only thing that's needed. But it has been underdeveloped and underfunded for many years. If we could get it established and running properly, I think we could make huge inroads into this problem over time.

A comprehensive, multi-faceted approach is key, and it needs to be augmented by extensive treatment. We do not have enough treatment for all of the variations of age, gender, high risk, and so on.

Prevention is proactive. It promotes personal responsibility, it's highly cost-effective, it's positive, not judgmental, it's persuasive, not coercive, and it's relevant at various stages of life. It's not just young children. Mid-life is a pivotal point for prevention strategies, and the pre-senior age is a wonderful opportunity for prevention strategies. But we're doing precious little on either of those.

Does prevention work? Yes, it does. It can. There are many examples, and the research is clear. There are some in the binder we've given you, and we can give you a lot more.

One of the goals of prevention is to delay early onset. We know now very clearly that if a kid makes it up to 18 or 19 with little or no regular drug use, the chances of them ever having a serious problem are very low. Alternatively, a 10-year-old, 11-year-old, or 12-year-old who's getting drunk every weekend or smoking pot regularly has a very high risk of having a severe drug problem. So it's not that hard. We know that if we can delay onset, we can probably save a lot of lives and a lot of suffering.

Can we delay onset? Yes. We do know what to do. There are some very promising strategies that have been shown to help kids keep deferring a bit longer. But we don't have the political will, the leadership, and the funds to implement and evaluate them and to have them happening on a scale that's commensurate with the problem. With the scope of this problem, the little bit of prevention that's floating around the edges is not nearly in proportion. If we're going to have an impact, it needs to be in proportion.

• 1620

Prevention must start early and be sustained over many years. We used to say to 16-year-olds, if you're going to drink when you're an adult, here are some things to remember. Well, guess what? Most 16-year-olds are already experimenting. In B.C., and probably most provinces, grades 8 and 9 are when a lot of experimentation is likely to begin. What's that based on? It's based on what that child has learned and acquired in the first 12 years of life, the attitudes, values, intentions, and experiences they've had. So the early years are pivotal. Yet what little prevention there is, is often geared to high school and beyond. I'm not saying that isn't needed as well.

The fact that drug abuse can arrest social, physical, and emotional development is a hugely important fact. We see it all the time in the treatment centres. I'm sure my colleagues would endorse the statement that people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who are coming in for treatment are desperately trying to learn what they bypassed when they were 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, or 17, because every time they had stress or a trauma, they got drunk or stoned.

So it's really important that we try to help people find ways so that their natural development, the job of an adolescent, can continue. If they're heavily into drug abuse, it's not going to be able to happen.

Every intervention affects every other intervention. We are not an advocate of focusing solely on any one intervention, although if you were to push me on it, I'd say focus solely on prevention.

All kidding aside, if harm reduction is all we're going to do, if that's going to lead the whole parade and dominate every aspect of everything we're doing, I don't think that's helpful and I don't think it's fair.

We have looked very hard at the issue of harm reduction. As an organization, we feel it is time to implement some of the things that are being suggested. Some of the low-threshold initiatives that would help an addict become stabilized would steer them toward getting more care and help and would eventually help them get off drugs, which would be the goal. If the goal of harm reduction is simply maintaining drug use, keeping drug users using indefinitely, then we can't support that.

Obviously, we are very concerned about how harm reduction is done. It should be done strategically and very carefully, with thorough evaluation and monitoring. We should also be concerned about how it's even talked about. I think we need to be honest that the media, for whatever reason, is fascinated by harm reduction. They are not fascinated by prevention or good solid treatment initiatives that work. But we need to try to reset that stage so that maybe even the media would show more interest in the whole range of services that are needed.

Is it helpful when we hear federal leaders making comments about medical marijuana in a way that suggests it is a joke or some kind of fun? That's not helpful. Medical marijuana should be pursued like any other medical drug. If there is a legitimate, defensible use of marijuana for medical purposes, let's get on with it and have it monitored and prescribed by physicians and handled properly, such as we would with other drugs. Many medical drugs are abused recreationally. Marijuana is predominately a recreational drug. I'm not convinced that it has medical value, but it's not for me to judge. I think the tests that Alan Rock has finally initiated should have been done 15 years ago and we should quietly get on with giving doctors what they need in order to treat people.

I don't think medical marijuana will ever be smoked and inhaled as a hot smoke. I can't see it. That's counterproductive. But there are inhalers and pills. There are other ways of dealing with it, if that is shown to be needed.

One of the things we're very concerned about is how we talk about harm reduction and how we convey it. Speaking as one who works primarily with young kids who are not yet into drug use, the messages we convey are important. If we legalize marijuana or go forward with harm reduction in a way that suggests to kids that these drugs are less harmful than we once thought, that's going to be very damaging, and it's not honest. Most of the research on marijuana is pointing in the other direction. We're finding that there are more downsides to marijuana, not the other way around.

I wanted to—

The Chair: Please wrap up your statement.

Mr. Art Steinmann: Okay.

• 1625

In terms of your specific points about Canada's drug strategy and the role of the federal government, I think the role of the federal government is to provide leadership and policy direction to promote best practices.

We think, in terms of expanding the knowledge base, yes, there needs to be better data collection, absolutely, but not just on drug usage. We need data collection on best practices, on effectiveness, on a whole range of things.

I've already talked about harm reduction, and I want to end by referring to some of the programs we're involved in.

We have this program that is geared to grade 6 and 7 kids. There are 1,070 classrooms that have chosen to obtain these materials in B.C. It's approved by the Ministry of Education. It's a coordinated, sequential way of educating kids and helping them to be better equipped to make their decisions in this area. But these programs were put together by us going to foundations to raising the money to develop the resources to do them.

It's the same with our parent workshops. When we have a parent workshop, we get requests from over 100 communities every year to travel out and do this workshop. We can do only about 30 or 40, because they don't have the money and we don't have the money. But the need is huge. Parents are desperate to know what they can do to prevent drug abuse. How can they strengthen the family? Where would they go for help if the kids did develop a drug problem?

Some years ago we did get some provincial and federal money to develop resources for the ethnic communities—Punjabi, Chinese, and Spanish materials. These were developed in their languages from the ground up, not translated. All of these were well implemented and well used, but then there were no funds to sustain them and keep them going.

Similarly, we were asked to develop materials for high-risk, low-literacy, pregnant women. Could fetal alcohol syndrome be prevented? Imagine! What we came up with after working with the women themselves was a pregnancy calendar and a host of other things. This was printed and sent out to all the health units in B.C. It went into its second printing. But now it's out of print, and it has been for years. It hasn't been sustained. I can go on and on. We have a program for high-risk use we developed some years ago, and the same thing has happened.

I'm out of time here, but I just want to make the point that almost all of these resources are evidence based, they're evaluated, they're health education, but they're not sustained, and they're not intense, so they can't produce the results.

I hope this committee will look very seriously at what needs to be done nationally to support and promote sound prevention activities that we know can make a difference.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you very much, Mr. Steinmann.

Now we'll hear from Kathy Oxner of the Pacifica Treatment Centre.

Ms. Kathy Oxner (Executive Director, Pacifica Treatment Centre): Thank you.

The Pacifica Treatment Centre is a residential treatment centre that's been operating in Vancouver on the east side. We moved there in 1991. It's a non-profit society that's been operating for 24 going on 25 years now. It's a co-ed facility offering service to both men and women, providing gender-specific groups.

To be short, I could say ditto to the presenters before me, because I agree strongly around the issues of prevention and the need for funding. I think one of the positions I would like to see this office take is a collaborative, more organized approach where you are working with other departments, jurisdictions, and providers at the community level.

I have over 20 years' experience working in a variety of settings from detox, methadone clinics, outpatient clinics, EAP programs, and residential treatment. Over the years, I've seen very little advancement in the treatment of addiction in Canada, and it saddens me.

I too had the opportunity to work for a couple of years in Boston, Massachusetts. They have a program outside of Boston called the CASPAR program. In the late seventies and early eighties, they were ahead of where we are today in 2001. They were providing treatment that included women and children, and the children were there. It provided a whole range of resources in the schools, where they worked with the younger children. They did peer teen programming. It was huge.

We continue to not work together. I think Donna highlighted it quite well when she said we have a system of care, but we don't have a system of care.

On paper it looks great, but what's been happening over the years is that we've continued to lose resources, funding, and now we have people on the front lines who are demoralized. It's very hard to sustain enthusiasm, excitement, and passion for this work. I think when we do see people who graduate from our programs, who do well, who come back and say, “Hey, I just got my 16-year cake, I'm glad to be a productive citizen again, thank you”, it does help to keep that drive going.

• 1630

I actually did have a few points related to the questions in the summary report, but I think my colleagues have addressed a lot of them here. I'm going to focus on harm reduction, because that's having a huge impact on our treatment facility right now. I do think we need to have a definition that works. I have a huge concern about harm reduction replacing all other aspects of our services.

Right now, one of the strategies in B.C. is to integrate all of our programs so that we take people on methadone and eliminate abstinence-based programming. Although I think there's a real need for some treatment options to be available for people who are on methadone and wanting to get help with other addictions, to eliminate abstinence-based programming in this province, I think, is a disservice to our community. I have grave concerns.

Do we listen to the focus groups and people who are directly affected who say we should look at a holistic approach? People say that environmentally it's a trigger for them to be in the same room with someone they know is stoned on methadone, that they're here trying to get off methadone, trying to get off heroin, and it's not safe for them. It's falling on deaf ears.

I hope we can look at these types of issues and deal with them, not just in terms of what makes sense economically, because in the long run it doesn't work that way. There has been research done out there over and over around the actual cost of not providing service, of not providing treatment beds. We're loading the front end with the harm reduction approach in B.C., and where are we going to put people?

Right now, Pacifica, after 24 years of service, may face closing their doors. We are having an emergency meeting this week. I find that frightening, considering we're the only treatment facility in Vancouver. You can tell I have some passion around this.

I don't think “one shoe fits all” is the best approach. It's been proven over time that it hasn't been. We need to have a multi-modal approach where we look at all issues. We're seeing more and more people suffering with post-traumatic stress, which, if not dealt with, makes it almost impossible to maintain any kind of successful recovery program. So we end up with a revolving door. We have people leaving detox who can't get into treatment because of the waiting lists, or because there's no access to out-patient counselling to help stabilize them until they can get to us or a recovery house. Again, part of that is a lack of funding, a lack of resources, and a lack of coordination of resources. There is duplication, and there is competition for the same dollars. It's not a very well-coordinated effort.

I think the leadership the federal government can provide the provinces and at the local level is considerable, and perhaps hasn't been done to the extent it can be.

I think also that harm reduction needs to be done from the community perspective, not for harm reduction itself. We need to provide financial support in a collaborative approach with all who are involved, including people in recovery.

In terms of research, again I think it's been much easier to look at the hard, biomedical, clinical, cognitive approach, because it's much narrower, much easier. It's not so easy to do research on a bio-psycho-social-spiritual model. It's a little messy and time consuming, because often you have to do more qualitative research, rather than quantitative. But I think the value of doing it will be immense.

• 1635

Drug replacement therapy is only one small aspect; however, in B.C. right now it's growing to a point where again I have some concerns. We treated alcoholism with Valium in the seventies. We're still paying for that. All you have to do is talk to someone who's been addicted to benzodiazepines to know the horror of that addiction.

At a meeting I was at last week, I said, what's happening to those who can't afford to go to places that are private, like Edgewood? Where are they going to go, when you're saying “We can't take them any longer”? Well, they can go south. I don't think that's a good answer. I think they should be able to stay in their home communities and get service.

I'd like to speak on a personal note. My brother-in-law came into Pacifica a little over a year ago, and as a result of that my entire family got help. My sister and my two nieces attended our family day program—again, one of the only programs available in the lower mainland where there's family included. My sister ended up going into treatment in February; my two nieces—their lives have completely changed.

Both my brother-in-law and my sister just took their one-year cake at the end of October. If you think that doesn't matter, you're wrong. There's a ripple effect that touches so many people. My nieces are in their teens. This may make a difference around prevention. My youngest niece, for the first time in a long time, has gone from barely passing to a B average this year. It matters.

So I really hope you take all of the areas around prevention, crime reduction, treatments—they're all very important. And although the costs at the front end are quite high, in the long term, just in one small family, four lives I know have been saved, and it has made a huge difference.

Thank you.

The Chair: Thank you for sharing that with us. I think we're going to be visiting Pacifica on Tuesday.

We now have some time for questions and answers. Why don't we go to Mr. White?

Mr. Randy White: Thank you, Paddy.

Of all the groups we've heard thus far, this particular group here more closely subscribes to the things that I see are really important. I sense much more of an affiliation with the philosophies that are drawn at this table. I too have been fighting with every level of government about a place called Campbell Valley Women's Centre, who are just about to close their doors. Can you imagine a 32-bed facility for addicted teenage females in the lower mainland about to close its doors? There should be 50 beds there and a waiting list of 1,000; yet it's closing its doors. One wonders about the logic of advocates of other programs when in fact these kinds of things are left.

I want to get to an issue that came out in the last session we had, and that is forced intervention. I talked to a number of people over the years about what would happen if there were facilities across this country for short-, intermediate-, long-term detox, and so on—facilities totally dedicated to drug addition—and the clientele who went in there were addicts who had, say, for lack of other argument, three convictions. For a fourth conviction, perhaps, “Okay, you're out. You're off the streets; you're going to a facility.”

I've tried this in committee in Ottawa on several who have various opinions—“You can't treat somebody who doesn't want to be treated”, and so on.

• 1640

I'll stay away from the downtown east side because that's the worst-case scenario, but this downtown east side exists in most communities today at one level or another, and I'm wondering what you think of a concept like that. Can it work? Can a modification of it work?

There are facilities coming available in this province, for instance, that I'm aware of—fairly large facilities that are available and could be converted. I'm just wondering, for clientele purposes, is it necessary? Could it help? Could it get people off the street who are otherwise unable or unwilling to take themselves off the street and get them into facilities and at least try from there, for a period of 18 to 24 months or something like that?

The Chair: Anyone? I see Ms. Baird; then I'll ask anyone who wishes to comment.

Ms. Donna Baird: This is something I had quite a bit of experience with in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where their laws are obviously different. Women who are pregnant, unless they access treatment, will be charged with child abuse. They're not motivated people once they enter treatment. I think there is some danger in having a homogeneous group where everybody is mandated, but there are certainly benefits where you can mix them with people who are motivated anywhere along that continuum.

We had a great deal of success with pregnant women who were mandated for treatment. We called them “legally motivated” clients. Once they were able to gain back some of their own thoughts that weren't driven by survival and getting their drug and the preoccupation that goes along with addiction, they became very motivated. We had a great deal of success with those clients.

We had other kids who were legally motivated—and that usually tends to be the only other kind of mandated client. Social services is another.

Again, if you're dealing with a homogeneous group, I think there is some danger that there's not a lot to aspire to. We definitely had some success; we got them in the door. I use the phrase “their brains are hijacked”. You're not dealing with their faculties any more. They are not logical, rational people. Once they were free from the drug, that came back slowly, and you'd be dealing with the core person who was screaming to get out. They got days under their belt and developed pride, and it gave them that edge to move forward and some pride to move forward.

So mandated treatment can work. I don't think it's the answer to everybody, but I've seen it work.

S/Sgt Chuck Doucette: In some of the other things I do—I am on the board of directors of the Pacifica Treatment Centre; I belong to a committee where there are a number of doctors of addiction medicine. Also on that same committee is a reformed addict who runs a treatment centre, Billy Weselowski. You may have run into him. I've been to Sweden twice and have seen the treatment centres they run in Sweden. They have coerced or mandatory treatment in Sweden, and it's successful there.

I'm told by those other people—the doctors of addiction medicine and the reformed addict—exactly what you've just heard, that it definitely can work. The notion that you have to wait for somebody to want treatment might be true in some cases, but in many cases the only reason they don't want treatment is that the addiction is controlling them. Once that is stabilized and they're detoxed, they respond very well. I think there is a place in our society for it; it would make a huge difference to the problems you have on the street in places like the downtown east side if you were able to put some of the people in a place that was mandatory.

The Chair: Mr. Howett.

Mr. Larry Howett: Well, I don't know. Maybe I could play the devil's advocate here and just ask myself, after dealing with addicts for a lifetime.... I have seen addicts who have been given life sentences; I have seen addicts who have been given every possible way of discouraging them from using drugs, and I haven't seen that this has discouraged any of them from doing it.

Brandon Lake was used not all that long ago in British Columbia as an alternative where addicts were sent to dry out, if you will. The courts sent them there, and at first blush what they said was, what we're going to do is force them into treatment or use the courts to do that. It fell apart, and it fell apart very quickly.

• 1645

In fact, addicts are very devious people, and they work things and use things and put it to their advantage. If they can use some kind of a program or something to try to work their way back out into the community, they are pretty good at that. I've seen a lifetime of it. When I say they're pretty good at it, they're very adept at it.

It also raises fundamental issues of freedom. In terms of what you do with a group of people, mandating some type of treatment is something that would have to pass the charter and the extent or the limits of what we define as freedom in Canada. I work in a law firm, so just from the point of view of that, I would have to ask myself on two levels whether we could find some common ground where you could pick and choose.

Yes, I have no doubt that some people would benefit from that if deep down inside they didn't want to be an addict—a specific group. A mother, as a pregnant woman, is a pretty motivated girl. That's a pretty specialized kind of group, but a typical, average, everyday back-alley dope fiend is not really a very motivated kind of person who wants to get off drugs. So forcing them into a treatment....

Drug court is something that I think is long overdue, and I'm encouraged that this is one of the alternatives that's being talked about here in Vancouver. But forced recovery? I don't know any addict who has ever been forced to quit using drugs. If a person wants to quit using drugs, they have a chance, and that's all they have, a chance. If they have the motivation to do it, fine, that's great, but I don't know that you can mandate a person to quit by locking them up. It hasn't worked.

The Chair: Thank you very much.

Can I ask a quick supplementary to you, Ms. Baird?

In the Minneapolis-St. Paul example, you said they were legally motivated. Does that mean they were given one of two sentencing options?

Ms. Donna Baird: That's correct.

The Chair: So there was some choice.

Ms. Donna Baird: There was a choice, and there are some programs within the prison system. But you're dealing with a pecking order, and you're dealing with their peers where it's survival in a contained environment, and to be going to some of these drug programs, they've shared with me that it's not the thing to do.

The Chair: Thank you.

Ms. Davies.

Ms. Libby Davies: Thank you very much.

Thank you for coming today. It has been a really interesting discussion, and we've had good discussions all day.

I want to pick up on Randy's comment about forced treatment. We haven't really gotten into this, but I actually have a huge problem with this because, on the one hand, I think we're all arguing that there is completely inadequate treatment in B.C.

I support the idea of treatment on demand, 24 hours a day. You shouldn't have to keep phoning detox, or go on a huge waiting list, or go to another province. You shouldn't have to get private care. So I have a big problem with us even talking about the debate of forced treatment when people who now want treatment can't get into it. Let's do first things first. I think it's a complete red herring to get into that. That's my little piece on that.

Secondly—

Mr. Randy White: We are allowed to talk about it, though, are we not?

Ms. Libby Davies: We're allowed to talk about it. Of course we are. That's what we're doing here today. But I'm giving my point of view.

In terms of harm reduction, this part of the session was to deal with education, but we had a number of people this morning who were experts in harm reduction and other areas, and I have to say, I've never heard an advocate of harm reduction ever say that harm reduction must be done at the expense of other things—and I worked with a lot of groups in the downtown east side. So again, I have a real problem when it's advanced that way.

I know there are limited funds, and because there has been so much debate about harm reduction, maybe people feel very threatened by that, that it will take over other parts of the four pillars. But this morning Martin Schechter, Michael O'Shaughnessy, all the people we heard from in fact were saying harm reduction is one way to lead to treatment, to lead to abstinence. This is not an either/or.

When we hear the RCMP saying harm reduction is used when prevention, treatment, and enforcement have failed, I have to say I completely disagree with you. You have it all wrong. You can't say we'd only have harm reduction when all these other things have failed. It is about a continuum, surely. It is about making contact with people where they are at. So I really feel that this debate pitting harm reduction against enforcement or treatment is completely misplaced.

• 1650

But the question I want to get at is actually on education. I'm very aware that there are programs. I really challenge the idea that realistic, holistic education about drugs would come from law enforcement agencies. To me, it's about education about choices, and honest information that's focused on health and well-being.

ADES has done amazing work over 50 years, and I really want to put the question to you. You sort of struggle along with your programs. You don't have enough support. If we are serious about education, which we should be and it is part of prevention, then it seems to me that it must have a health focus, that this is where it has to come from. When we send cops into schools...I've been at those schools where these programs are being conducted, and the kids are completely turned off. I don't feel that it's realistic. So I'd like to ask each of you...in terms of that, we all agree that we need education, but I think the question is, who should do it?

I don't see it primarily as a police responsibility, and I don't think two-week training for police officers is adequate. It's not where it's at. They can provide a supporting role, but primarily we're talking about a health care issue, and surely this must come from health care professionals and counsellors, and so on, and be mandated within the school district, starting at grades 1 and 2, and certainly the elementary grades.

The Chair: I think we have Mr. Steinmann and Ms. Baird.

Mr. Art Steinmann: Thank you for the question. I'm not here to put down or be critical of other programs. Particularly, I don't think that's necessarily helpful. But in terms of what kind of education is going to work, yes, we favour a model where you use a trained educator, a teacher, as the primary delivery person, and use police and public health nurses, and possibly recovering addicts, if they're well screened and well prepared, as resource people to the program.

We have a program that obviously competes with theirs, so I'm in a little bit of an awkward spot here. But all of that aside, one of my concerns about theirs is whether it's sustainable because of the cost—and maybe Chuck can address this—of having trained officers...first of all, taking police officers and retooling them to be health educators and then putting them into the classes at all grade levels. So that it is cumulative, so that it is ongoing from K to 12, I just don't see how we can manage to have enough police officers in all the classrooms doing this drug education in such a major way, because it costs hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars, to do that.

Alternatively, teachers are well positioned. They need support. We need to do a lot more to help teachers be better health educators. Many of them can adapt it very quickly, but it's not mandated. Well, it is mandated, but they're not given the training and support and resources they need.

I'm not sure if that totally addresses the question, but I know there are mixed reviews on DARE, mixed reviews on lots of programs.

I think some kids do find a uniformed police officer has a different effect. I think we have to be frank. It's possible that a uniformed police officer may cause kids to give answers that they think are expected, or it may inhibit them from being as open and as honest. What we want is, in the safety of the classroom, kids to role play and discuss all the issues, all the aspects, so that they're better prepared when Friday night rolls around and their best friend offers them a drag on a joint, or whatever, that they've really had good, realistic preparation for those situations.

I'm sure there are other perspectives, but....

The Chair: We have Ms. Baird, and then Staff Sergeant Doucette and Ms. Oxner.

Ms. Donna Baird: You brought up several points, and I feel quite passionate about a couple of them, having worked in residential programming, and moving back to Vancouver and working with fetal alcohol adults.

The question was posed to me by one of those fetal alcohol adults...that we didn't do anything to protect her, her rights. Here she is an adult who's non-functional in our society, who's a follower in these gangs and crowds. She can't learn; she doesn't have the ability to reflect those kinds of things. I truly see a place for mandating women, even if they choose not to maintain abstinence after their pregnancy. That's completely their right.

• 1655

But what about these adults we're talking to now in treatment, who have developed addictions that we haven't advocated and we don't have resources for now? They're living on the streets. I had a hard time with that. I worked a lot with those women. It's something to chew on. I don't know exactly what the answer is, but they need to be represented somehow.

The harm reduction/abstinence thing, again, was something that was, I'll use the term “thrown at us”, when I was working in residential treatment, moving back here to Canada. We were told we were doing harm reduction. No one defined it for us. No one told us how we were going to do it. We were going to do it; that was the bottom line.

Ms. Libby Davies: Who told you that?

Ms. Donna Baird: Central office in Victoria.

Ms. Libby Davies: Okay.

Ms. Donna Baird: Victoria did. And we have people making decisions, again, who are not addiction experts. They told us, again threw in our laps, “You will do accreditation”, and that has cost our province, our country, tens of millions of dollars to do accreditation, instead of modifying and having something here and putting money into programming. And nobody told us how. It cost my agency this year $40,000 to go through accreditation. That's one position gone. And to maintain it...there's no money in the funds to do it.

I'm 100% on line with accreditation, but there are these things that are imposed without any context, without any training or education for us. Again, for us, harm reduction had as many definitions as addiction did. It's not at the expense of abstinence. I don't see it at all as an expense, but that's how it was presented. Twelve-step programs were pooh-poohed.

I was running a 12-step-based treatment centre. We were told we were not to do that, we were to do harm reduction, and that was at the expense of our 12-step program, at the expense of abstinence. I think that's probably why you're hearing people presenting things, one versus the other, because that's how it was presented. There was no education for the people providing the services.

It brings up the question of decision-makers in Victoria, the accountability, the expenditures. There's no consultation process when it comes to imposing service modalities on people who are working in the field, and if they're going to be imposed, the training that goes along with it—backing up again, giving education and training to trainers. Who are our specialists? Where have they received their training? We don't have it here. We have VCC, who offer components, but there's no standardization, there's no governance.

Ms. Libby Davies: Was accreditation really important?

Ms. Donna Baird: It's very important.

Ms. Libby Davies: That's part of accountability, isn't it?

Ms. Donna Baird: Yes, 100%. And I'm totally on line with it. I'll speak for myself. It was that we didn't adopt any accreditation process that is currently operating in our hospital systems or what have you. We went to the States. We're paying American dollars for accreditation, and it has been tens of millions of dollars that we have paid to the United States to go through accreditation. We could have modified something here. ASAP-BC put forth proposals to modify and adapt an accreditation process, but nobody would listen. I think that's craziness. And again, we're going back to where the words were coming down from central office. Where's the accountability, where's the training, where are the specialists who are mandating us to do these things?

The Chair: Staff Sergeant Doucette, and then the doctors. Remember, there's a band about to start.

S/Sgt Chuck Doucette: I want to say one little bit about harm reduction as well. With all due respect, your comments about the RCMP may be valid; however, in my capacity as a drug runs person, I sat on what used to be called the Addictions Advisory Committee for the Ministry of Children and Families that talked about addiction services. Indeed, I heard the discussions of the strategies to force people to go into harm reduction, just as you heard from Donna.

I'm glad she brought that up, because I was there hearing them plan how they were going to do it, and then I go and sit on a board of directors at the Pacifica Treatment Centre and we sit there and decide how we're going to do it. So I know the way the province was looking at it was definitely going to take resources from prevention and treatment in order to do harm reduction. There was no question about it.

Maybe at the federal level it's different. My apologies if it offended you in that respect. But I certainly know from the provincial level that that was going to happen. I am very sensitive to that because I think, as Art said, without prevention, we'll never get out of this wheel. I do believe in harm reduction along the way, but it has to be put in perspective.

• 1700

When it comes to the police in the classrooms, it's interesting. The University of Akron, Ohio, which I'm told is one of the leading universities in terms of prevention, just reviewed the DARE program for DARE America and have rewritten the secondary school program and are now in the process of rewriting the elementary school program. One of the first things they said when they reviewed the program—and the funding was provided by Robert Wood Johnston, not by DARE, so hopefully it was an independent review—was that the best delivery method for primary prevention is uniformed police officers. Indeed, that's why DARE is so successful; it's because of that method. So I'm relying a little bit on that research when I continue to wish for the RCMP to stay involved.

The other part is that when you talk about what has been happening in this province, and even though Art's organization has been around for a long time—I've known Art as long as I've been the drug awareness coordinator and we've worked together on many things—the fact is there is not enough prevention happening in this province. Teachers are coming to us every day saying, “We don't know what to do or how to do it and we can't do it. Will you please help us?” So the police took up the call and came into the schools to do prevention because no one else was doing it. Indeed, if nobody else was right now, it wouldn't be happening. So I think DARE is better than nothing and that there is certainly a good chance of it working if we cooperate.

Art and I have talked about this a lot, in terms of bringing in other programs where it's more applicable, certainly at the high school level and things like that. But when you talk about young children—grades 5 and 6—they love uniformed police officers, and we want to build that cooperation and build up the rapport with them as they grow older, so they don't look at us as somebody who's going to give them a speeding ticket or something, but look to us for help, as they should. It's very important to us that we continue that kind of thing, so I think it definitely has a place. It doesn't have to be the only game in town, but it has a place.

The Chair: Thank you. Ms. Oxner.

Ms. Kathy Oxner: To look at a different area for education and a need that I've seen over the years, it is in the medical field. There's no requirement for doctors or nurses to be educated in addiction, and having come from that field, with my background in nursing prior to social work, it hasn't changed a whole lot. Your family doctor is a really important part of your ongoing health in the community, and I think doctors have an in-road by which they could be more effective and make a difference.

On the harm reduction issue as well, again, the fear I raised was that we've seen, especially with.... The Sheeway project, as one example, has been very, very positive, an excellent model of accessing women and being able to then present resources and treatment that they have taken advantage of. But, initially, it has to start with a safe place, food, warmth, the human aspect of treatment and healing.

Again, what's happening in B.C. is that there is a transfer of funds where they are starting to eliminate those resources. That will result in a cost that I think we're going to see in the very near future if we don't take a more holistic approach to harm reduction being part of a continuum of care.

Mr. Larry Howett: Perhaps I may add a few things, because education is something that I've always believed in very deeply. When I go into the schools and talk to kids and teachers, and talk to other organizations, I go in and speak in a program called Choices, and that's what it's about. It's about going in and offering choices to children. I don't care who offers those choices to the children as long as they are good choices, as long as they are trying to make them understand better what it is they're facing in this world and how to deal and cope with a lot of the problems that we see they have.

• 1705

For instance, a lot of kids today don't have the ability to make good choices because they don't have enough supervision. The families are fracturing. Both parents have to work now because they have to pay the bills. Kids have more and more time on their hands and fewer and fewer community resources and places to go.

When I was a kid, parks used to be places where there were organized sports of all types and kinds. All over Vancouver, the parents got involved in putting them together and making sure the kids had a good time. Now there's less of that and more places for kids to go to get involved in bad things. What's worse, the opportunity to do so is there.

LINC, which is another program I'm involved with, has a program called Edge, where they send ex-offenders to talk to kids. They talk to them about the poor choices they made, and by way of example use them to try to get through to kids. Whatever it takes it doesn't matter. Whatever it takes to get through to the kids is important—any and all types and kinds of education.

I happen to agree that officers in uniform, especially with younger children in schools, have a tremendous influence. I would wholeheartedly support that, hands down. I would also support any other types or kinds of educational programs in respect of that issue.

One of the things I have seen that's made me very sad is that some of the organizations, because of a lack of funding, seem to compete. They seem to view each other almost jealously and say, “There's only so much money and it's our program that goes in and talks to the kids.” It doesn't matter who does it. I wish everybody would do it. So it's very important that they not have to compete for that kind of money.

The Chair: Thank you.

We'll have a quick comment from Mr. Steinmann.

Mr. Art Steinmann: We sort of have a hornets' nest going on here, don't we?

The main point I was trying to make was, are we going to now look seriously at putting uniformed police officers in all grades, in all schools, at all levels? That was my main point. I don't think that's sustainable.

Does DARE have a place? It may. Chuck, you and I probably need to talk again, because from the research I saw coming out of the Wood Foundation, they said the one thing they weren't going to look at was who delivered the program. They were going to evaluate all the lessons and everything else, but the document I had said the one thing they weren't going to evaluate was whether it should be taught by policemen or not.

The Chair: Maybe you two can have that discussion and get back to us.

S/Sgt Chuck Doucette: I personally called last week.

The Chair: Okay. I'm sure there's a way for us to get the definitives.

Mr. Art Steinmann: As a last comment, there is a danger of going a little too far down the road. We welcome anyone who goes into the classroom and talks to kids at all about this. As an educator and someone who's trained in education, and having looked at the research and a lot of evaluations, some things have counterproductive results, and some things don't have the results we anticipate. If it were as simple as having a recovered addict just scare kids off drugs, we could do that, get on with the job and solve the problem. But it's much more sophisticated than that.

I'm just saying we need to bring proper rigour to education as well as to treatment and all of the other modalities, so we are going with evidence-based best practices approaches.

The Chair: You can't just have anybody waltz into a classroom, right?

Mr. Art Steinmann: Right.

The Chair: It depends on what province you're in.

Just as a piece of information, there's an amazing program called the Smart Risk Foundation. It's really about trying to prevent injuries to young people, particularly head and spinal cord injuries, and death. It's part of making better choices.

From being the vice-chair of the justice committee a few years ago when we studied the Young Offender's Act, it seemed like so many children needed to grow up learning to make appropriate decisions. As adults, we hopefully have been cared for and that's been nurtured along the way. But clearly, everyone has different family experiences, and different things work in different families.

There's one question I wanted to ask you, Ms. Oxner. I was kind of joking when you mentioned that doctors don't have treatment, but it would seem that's actually a pretty important area. There's also the situation where doctors facilitate drug abuse by continuing to provide drugs for years on end, whether it's Valium or something else.

• 1710

From your experience, should we be doing more in the educational system of medical professionals to incorporate it? It would seem that in the education area we need to be more seamless in making sure everyone's aware of options, healthy choices, and how to look out for and direct people who need help with addictions, whether it's anorexia and whatever else, so that as a population we become healthier and make better decisions.

Ms. Kathy Oxner: When I was working in Boston, one of the doctors I worked with was one of the administrators at Harvard University. They ended up making it mandatory for all doctors, as part of their training, to spend 12 weeks in addiction.

They had to spend three weeks in detox and four weeks in an out-patient setting, where they might be doing physicals and those kinds of things—methadone treatment clinics. Then they had to spend the remaining time in an emergency ward in a hospital dealing with people who came in with drug- and alcohol-related problems—drug overdoses. Then they had to follow them through.

I thought that was a very interesting approach, and I have a feeling they were probably turning out doctors who really had a keen sense, on a variety of levels, of the impact of addiction on people's lives, not just from a physiological point of view.

Ms. Donna Baird: The facility I worked at in Minnesota, Hazelden, also had what was called the professionals and residents program. It was similar to what Kathy was talking about. They required the physicians to actually be part of the treatment regime and go through the program.

The Chair: Great. Thank you.

I apologize, we have to cut the discussion a little short. We knew there was going to be a party next door, but we did not know there was going to be a band practice. Some of you may want to go in the other room and give them advice. I'm sure they'd appreciate that. You could dance a few songs.

We appreciate very much you sharing with us your experiences and ideas. Clearly these are complicated problems. You've given us lots of food for thought, and that's terrific.

If you have other ideas, you're very welcome to send them to our clerk, Carol Chafe. She will make sure they're translated and circulated, so everyone can benefit from them.

We are here in Vancouver until Wednesday, and then we'll be in Abbotsford on Thursday. The committee will be finishing its work probably in June, and then reporting in November. So if you have any ideas in the interim, please get back to us.

Thank you for the warm B.C. welcome. This meeting is adjourned until 9 o'clock tomorrow morning, when we will hear from Donald MacPherson from the City of Vancouver. Thank you.