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Time to Get Tough with Skid Road Misfits

By Submitted Article

Sunday, August 23, 2009 03:53 AM

by Justice Wallace Gilby Craig - retired

 
Vancouver's 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 stretch in jail as pure punishment for their parasitical behaviour.
 
My 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.
 
Medicalization is simply an expedient way to transform the deviant moral and criminal behaviour of drug addicts into a non-deviant medical issue.
 
You 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.
 
They have adopted a stigma-neutral lexicon including words and definitions such as “problematic substance abuse” rather than “drug abuse”, and “illegal” for “illicit” to eliminate moral/ethical considerations.
 
It 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.
In Romancing Opiates – Pharmacological Lies and the Addiction Bureaucracy, Dr. Anthony Daniels says that “medical consequences (of addiction), however terrible, do not make a disease.”
 
Before 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.
 
Based 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 “it 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.”
 
In forming his opinion Daniels also relied on the experience of American soldiers during and after the Vietnam War: “Thousands of American soldiers, especially towards the end (of the war), addicted themselves to heroin. … 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.
 
“And 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.”
 
When Skid Road’s 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.
 
The festering sore of Skid Road is a national disgrace. It is worse today than in 2000.
 
Parliament 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.
 
It’s high time to take back our streets and public places. So just do it, all you members of Parliament.
 

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Comments

Well said!
About time someone started telling it like it is,but unfortunately I doubt anyone is listening.
Drug addiction is a personal choice,not a "disease", as so many would like us to believe.
We can say the same about alcohol abuse but because alcohol is "legal",we tend to ignore it.
I have always believed that the first step in recovery is "responsibility".
Making excuses for any related criminal behavior that seems to go along with drugs is wrong, and it only compounds the problem.
Our system does not provide help for these addicts,it enables them, by disregarding any social or moral responsibility and actually making it easier for them to engage in this lifestyle.
We do that under the premise that it is safer and better for the general public.
It does appear the problem is growing and will continue to do so,until we get back to basics and treat illegal drugs,their sale,and their use, as the crime it is.
Our society offers almost nothing in terms of responsibility or recovery.
We simply hand out an unsupervised welfare cheque each month or a warm meal everyday and allow the pattern to continue.
Enabling drug addicts has become an industry in itself by providing funding and jobs for people who seem to think they are helping the situation by advocating for these people and keeping them safe on the streets.
Who keeps the public safe from the addicts?
As our tolerence for drug addiction and drugs in general grows, the situation becomes even more dangerous.
As far as our government/s are concerned,they are simply taking the easy way out and shirking their own responsibility to the general public by pretending that these addicts are under control.
They are not,they are completely out of control, and we have allowed that to happen by not treating drug addiction for what it is.
A crime!
Great article Justice Craig!





When a government terrorizes its citizens it will always do this using the outsider evil motivation (ie in this case drugs), as its justification for state terror. A people who fall outside of the law and are criminalized because of their drug addictions will have a much higher propensity to lack regard for the legitimacy of laws and public norms. It becomes a polarizing war that is nothing more than game theory gone bad by the vested interests and the problem grows as a result.

A free society is one where people have a right to express their views without fear of arrest, imprisonment or physical harm... a drugy doing soft drugs that do no harm to others is expressing a viewpoint, and not one that we will all agree with, but they are in effect expressing a view point. When we outlaw the dissent of societies most vulnerable then we can no longer call ourselves a free society, and we are on a slippery slope to totalitarianism. ie Jimmy Two Boots looks like he's stoned, so lets haul him in for an interrogation and some tough love... as advocated in the above article.

Crimes are actions that effect other people... violent behavior, loitering, littering, BnE's, robbery, j-walking, or disorderly conduct in public... we have lots of laws where a persons freedom can be restricted because their behavior conflicts with the rights of others. Those are the laws that should be enforced. Using the drug laws for the enforcement of a social agenda undermines the whole legal system, and is counterproductive creating an even larger problem than would otherwise exist.

IMHO

I forgot to mention that if you do the crime you should do the time... that is the heart of the problem we have with the justice system today... not drug addicts and the crimes they commit....
Hear! Hear!
Great article. Much of it can be applied to our own filthy downtown as well.
In Order to pay for your Addiction you have to commit criminal Acts, so for this alone I can't support them.
Great post, Andy!

We already have a Canadian Charter of Human Rights, but we don't have (yet) a Canadian Charter of Human Duties and Obligations in Society.

A Public Safety Act is badly needed, too in order to eliminate the present Skid Road pandemonium.

Wow, somebody finally calling it like it is. I am in full agreement.
Ditto
I overall agree with the statements of this retired judge, but point out that not everyone living on the skids in the lower mainland is a normal, functioning person.

A lot of people living on the skids have mild to severe mental problems, more than a few ended up on the skids because there wasn't anywhere for them to go.

It's disingenuous to advocate a hard line against all people living on the skids without distinguishing between normal people and those suffering with mental illness.

If people really knew the numbers of people with mental illness walking among us and understood the ramifications of it, they wouldn't be so quick to lock everyone up.

Would you lock up your mom, dad, son or daughter, brother or sister in a correctional center for being schizophrenic?
Most of these miscreants wouldn't even be on skid road if the BC government hadn't closed Riverview. If they're drug addicted, it's because they're self-medicating.
I thought we were talking about the ones who are habitual thieves, exhibit violent behavior on a regular basis and crime being their weekly pastime. We are not insinuating Aunt Martha with mental problems.
No, laws like this can apply to anyone depending on the whims of the day.. that is why all encompassing laws like this proposal are so dangerous. Its a bad precedent if we want to live in a free society no matter how great it sounds to get the 'bad guy' once and for all.

What is the issue here? Is it drugs? Is it violent behavior? Is it criminality in general? Is it the combination of drugs and crime/violence? Is it self medicating schizophrenics? Is it just a policy to generally witch hunt for undesirables? All are very different subjects that require very different approaches and this author likes to lump it all in to one big nasty example to get maximum effect. Thats not justice.

A much better law would be to propose if a violent act is committed while under the influence of drugs its an automatic one year prison sentence with no appeal for extenuating circumstances. A crime needs to be committed in my opinion before one becomes a criminal... self medicating on its own should not be considered a crime.

I think the essay is about taking back our streets and public places, cleaning up what were once vibrant districts and what have now become Skid Roads - like parts of downtown in Prince George, Vancouver, Kelowna....etc.

Self medication in private does not affect whole streets and districts of cities, so Eagleone has a good point about rights of an individual to make choices which are not directly detrimental to society, although they might be so indirectly.

"When Skid Road�s 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."

That is not something society should tolerate ad infinitum, imho.
To put into perspective the validity of this retired judges opinion, the term is skid row, not road. It is not a literal street name, rather a moniker assigned to a degraded area of a town usually associated with the destitute.

with that in mind, he has got no clue about what goes on with those people except what he has seen from the bench and from the news. Neither situation can provide an unbiased perspective. The news is sensationalized and the bench is informed by the prosecution and their ilk.

Not all drug addicts fall to crime. If that were the case then more would be in jail. It is the minority that cannot function in society and turn to crime so they can imbibe more frequently and to a greater degree. They choose the depth of the addiction.

I think Justice Craig needs to go and live on skid row for a month or so to see what the reality is. That would surely change his tune?!?
The people you are describing Diplomat should obviously receive a higher penalty from the law because of their compounding problems. We should have laws for that IMO. That is not what 'Justice' Wallace is talking about though.
IMHO
You may find it interesting to read about Portugal's decriminalization of the possession of drugs (2001). It is a different approach altogether and the results are somewhat encouraging.
For what it's worth, the terms "Skid Row" and "Skid Road" are interchangible. They mean the same thing.
Mexico decriminalized all drugs for personal use last week as well. It will be interesting to see how the US reacts to that.