{"id":5242,"date":"2009-10-13T13:45:55","date_gmt":"2009-10-13T12:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/?p=5242"},"modified":"2009-10-13T13:48:21","modified_gmt":"2009-10-13T12:48:21","slug":"time-to-get-tough-with-skid-road-misfits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/2009\/10\/time-to-get-tough-with-skid-road-misfits\/","title":{"rendered":"Time To Get Tough With Skid Road Misfits"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nAugust 19, 2009<\/p>\n

VANCOUVER\u2019S Skid Road is a slummy end-of-the-line refuge for drug-addicted criminals.
\nOnce a vibrant district, Skid Road is now overrun by junkie marauders who plunder law abiding citizens and merchants in a predictable pattern of violence and property crime.
\nJust deserts for these incorrigibles ought to be detoxification followed by a significant stretch in jail as pure punishment for their parasitical behaviour.
\nMy suggestion that we get tough with Skid Road misfits will likely draw a cacophony of cluck-clucking from big-brother medical health officers and senior bureaucrats engaged in an Orwellian scheme to medicalize drug addiction.
\nMedicalization is simply an expedient way to transform the deviant moral and criminal behaviour of drug addicts into a non-deviant medical issue.
\nYou may recall that since 2000, the City of Vancouver and the Vancouver Coastal Health Authority have engaged in pernicious campaign to neutralize criminalization of possession of illicit drugs. They unabashedly mislead the general public with the falsehood that drug addiction is: a particular kind of disease displaying special symptoms; that it is beyond personal agency and self-imposed abstinence; and, that it requires professional medical assistance under the aegis of an addictions bureaucracy.
\nThey have adopted a stigma-neutral lexicon including words and definitions such as \u201cproblematic substance abuse\u201d rather than \u201cdrug abuse\u201d, and \u201cillegal\u201d for \u201cillicit\u201d to eliminate moral\/ethical considerations.
\nIt is indisputable that opiates are poisons; and it is equally a fact that there will always be rogue citizens who, regardless of the risk, want to narcotize themselves out of the uncertainties and rigours of daily life, even if it inevitably leads to life of crime and ill health.
\nIn Romancing Opiates \u2013 Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, Dr. Anthony Daniels says that \u201cmedical consequences (of addiction), however terrible, do not make a disease.\u201d
\nBefore publishing Romancing Opiates in 2006, Daniels had worked 14 years as a doctor in a large general hospital in a British slum, and in an even larger prison nearby. During this period opiate addiction increased dramatically and Daniels began treating as many as 20 new cases a day. He witnessed a worsening of the problem even though drug clinics increased as did medication prescribed to addicts.
\nBased on his experience with addicts and his extensive reading, Daniels rejects the notion that opiate addiction is relatively instantaneous. He says that it requires determination to reach habitual use three or four times a day, and that \u201cit is truer to say that the addict hooks heroin than that heroin hooks the addict. The active principle in the exchange is the person, not the drug, and the addiction is a freely chosen state: an obvious fact that is ignored by the addiction bureaucracy.\u201d
\nIn forming his opinion Daniels also relied on the experience of American soldiers during and after the Vietnam War: \u201cThousands of American soldiers, especially towards the end (of the war), addicted themselves to heroin. \u2026 What happened to them when they went home? Only one in eight of the addicts continued with his addiction after return to the United States, and by two and three years after their return, the addiction rates among those who had served were no higher than among those who qualified for the draft but did not serve in Vietnam.
\n\u201cAnd what help or services did these thousands of addicts receive when the returned home? For all intents and purposes, it varied between very little and none. They simply stopped taking heroin and did not resume.\u201d
\nWhen Skid Road\u2019s drug addicts go about robbing and stealing to fund their purchases of illicit drugs, they are cunning, wily and mindful of what they are doing. They are not automatons.
\nThe festering sore of Skid Road is a national disgrace. It is worse today than in 2000.
\nParliament has the constitutional right to enact a Public Safety Act that would authorize police to arrest any person found in a public place in a state of incapacitation by illicit drugs, and to forthwith render that person to a justice of the peace for committal into a secure detoxification facility.
\nIt\u2019s high time to take back our streets and public places. So just do it, all you members of Parliament.<\/p>\n

Source:wallace-gilby-craig@shaw.ca. \u2013 North Shore News \u2013 Aug 19\/09<\/em>
\n<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

August 19, 2009 VANCOUVER\u2019S Skid Road is a slummy end-of-the-line refuge for drug-addicted criminals. Once a vibrant district, Skid Road is now overrun by junkie marauders who plunder law abiding citizens and merchants in a predictable pattern of violence and property crime. Just deserts for these incorrigibles ought to be detoxification followed by a significant […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-canada"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5242"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5242\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/drugprevent.org.uk\/ppp\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}