VANDU rejects Liberal’s call to isolate addicts

Starting at noon on Saturday (July 19), members of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users will mark the group’s 10th anniversary at Oppenheimer Park. It’s the same park where, a year before VANDU was incorporated in 1998, Ann Livingston and other advocates for the health-care rights of addicts planted crosses to commemorate the deaths of drug users in the Downtown Eastside.

It took five years of protests and lobbying before Insite, Vancouver’s only supervised injection site, formally opened, giving drug users not only a clean environment in which to shoot up, but also the opportunity to access treatment and counselling.

“People are still dying, but they’re not dying of overdose anymore,” Livingston, VANDU’s executive program director, told the Georgia Straight.

If Livingston has her way, more supervised injection sites will be opened in the city, as well as in other areas where there’s a clustering of addicts who shoot up drugs in public. “I view it as a social-justice movement,” she said. “People addicted to drugs have the right to health care.”

Livingston also dismissed as “naive” the notion that addicts should be isolated and made to kick their habit before they’re allowed to rejoin mainstream society.

This is precisely what B.C. Liberal candidate Stephen Chong has called for.

In an advisory sent to Chinese-language media regarding his formal nomination on July 3 as the B.C. Liberal candidate for Vancouver–Mount Pleasant, Chong stated that he wants to remove the injection site from the constituency and keep similar facilities out of other areas with high business and residential concentrations. Chong later told the Straight in a phone interview that drug users should be sent to an “island”.

Albert Fok, president of the Vancouver Chinatown Revitalization Committee, told the Straight that he doubts Chong’s message will resonate with voters, including those of Chinese descent. Fok said that as chair of the Vancouver Chinatown Merchants Association, he “took a lot of heat” from the community when he supported the opening of Insite in 2003. However, the community’s attitude has changed over the past five years, he noted.

Fok suggested that, rather than removing Insite from the Downtown Eastside, efforts must be made to put additional injection facilities in other areas of Metro Vancouver.

Vancouver–Mount Pleasant NDP MLA Jenny Kwan told the Straight that Chong should apologize to the community for his statements. “And if he doesn’t, I don’t think he should run,” she said. “I think he should resign as a candidate for the Liberal party.”

In a brief interview with the Straight on July 15, Chong dismissed as “no big deal” the statements he made about Insite and drug users. He declined to comment further, saying he’ll deal with the matter if he gets elected.