VANCOUVER - Critics of the Conservative government's new anti-drug plan are calling it everything from naive to politically opportunistic and a threat to the civil liberties of Canadians.
A coalition of Vancouver health and social groups says prison terms and attempts to scare users straight won't solve Canada's illegal drug problem.
"You just can't incarcerate your way out of this,'' former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, a member of the Beyond Prohibition Coalition, said Friday. "The United States locks down 2.3 million people every night.''
Owen, an architect of Vancouver's drug safe-injection site, told a news conference the Tory government's adoption of policies similar to the failed war on drugs in the United States is "uninformed.''
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has been skeptical of the safe-injection site's claimed harm-reduction benefits, promised Thursday to put more drug dealers behind bars and help drug users kick their habits in the $64-million anti-drug plan.
Another coalition member, former B.C. provincial court judge Jerry Paradis, said illegal drugs have been used as a political gimmick by prime ministers for decades.
"Stephen Harper has just discovered the political usefulness of drugs finally and that all of this is posturing leading up to a federal election,'' said Paradis.
The issue is personal for drug addict Dean Wilson, who showed up late and dishevelled to speak to the media.
He said he's still trying to comprehend what the government is attempting to do.
"If he came down here and saw what was going on, I think he would change his mind,'' Wilson said, pointing out the window to Vancouver's gritty Downtown Eastside, Ground Zero of the West Coast's drug problem.
"Dead people don't detox. We've got to keep them alive long enough to make the right decision.''
Harper noted during his announcement that two-thirds of the funding will go to prevention and treatment for addicts and to promotional campaigns to keep people away from drugs.
The coalition said harm reduction should be the centre of a government strategy that includes not only treatment but social housing and employment.
On the eve of Harper's announcement, the government announced another extension of the safe-injection site's special Health Canada licence to operate, which expires at the end of the year. Supporters had been worried Ottawa would not renew it.
Ann Livingston from the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users said the government needs to stop criminalizing drug users.
"Unless Canadians move forward and change our drug policy and our drugs laws, I think that we're going to be feeling like we're trying to move a mountain with a teaspoon,'' she said
Paradis, a provincial judge for 28 years, agreed crime and drugs can be related but prohibition and not the drugs themselves are at the root of the crime.
"I've never had a case of a kid who smoked too much marijuana taking a pickaxe to somebody else's head at a party,'' he said referring to what's believed to have been an alcohol-fuelled fight at a Calgary house party where a 17-year-old man was killed last weekend.
The B.C. Civil Liberties Association opposes the new approach for mandatory minimum sentences for serious drug crimes, calling it a "significant threat to civil liberties.''
In a news release, the association said the same approach in the United States resulted in unjust prison sentences while it failed to reduce the supply or demand for drugs.
"If this government believes that a drug strategy primarily relying on enforcement will work, then it should be willing to prove that to taxpayers,'' said association spokesman Kirk Tousaw.
"We call on the auditor general to conduct a comprehensive review of the economic and social costs of drug prohibition in Canada.''
Owen said believes he already knows the results.
"My message to Mr Harper and the Conservative government is we win -- you lose, we're right --you're wrong and it's just a matter of time that they'll have to reverse their position or somebody else will be running the country.''
The head of the Canadian Professional Police Association endorsed the government's plan, calling it a strong message to drug dealers.
