Drug plan rattles Chinatown

Vancouver's Chinatown establishment is skeptical of Mayor Sam Sullivan's drug-substitution initiative.

The Chinese hold very strong views about illegal drugs, according to Vision Vancouver councillor George Chow. He notes that in English, the words medicine and drug are sometimes used interchangeably, but the word for drug in Chinese means "poison".

In 2002, Chow ran as an independent candidate for council, campaigning against the opening of Insite, Vancouver's supervised-injection site. Chow told the Georgia Straight that he and several Chinatown regulars have since accepted that the facility has helped reduce harm for both drug users and members of the community.

But when council decided to endorse Sullivan's Chronic Addiction Substitution Treatment initiative at a June 14 meeting, Chow cast the lone dissenting vote. CAST is a research trial to test replacing street drugs with orally administered prescription medications.

"There are so many unknowns in terms of implementation," Chow said. "I think it's more like harm reduction because you're just substituting one form of drugs for another. The obvious problem would be 'How do you dispense the drugs? Do they come in and get the drugs and consume it on the spot? Or do they take them home like you do with prescription drugs? If you do and if they turn around and sell the drugs, what would happen?'"

Under former mayor Philip Owen, Vancouver adopted the four-pillars strategy to address drug addiction. According to Chow, the focus has been primarily on harm reduction rather than on the other three pillars: prevention, treatment, and enforcement.

"The Chinese community is very big on treatment," Chow said. "We have been doing not really the four pillars of the program. We've just been doing harm reduction."

Albert Fok, chair of the Vancouver Chinatown Merchants Association, told the Straight that he won't oppose Sullivan's CAST initiative, but he acknowledged that the mayor, who speaks Cantonese, has a lot of convincing to do in Chinatown.

"I think at the moment it's neutral," Fok said, describing the attitude of Vancouver's Chinese toward the program.

With private funds raised by Sullivan, the Inner Change Society was established to set up CAST in the Downtown Eastside. Its immediate focus will be on 700 drug users and sex workers.

Richard Mulcaster, the society's executive director, noted that the group has yet to finish the research protocols it will submit to federal health authorities. He told the Straight that Health Canada needs to approve the society's proposed "off labelling" of substitution drugs, which means changing the original, approved purpose of a particular drug.

"We're looking into the first quarter of 2008 for the first trial to be under way," Mulcaster said.

According to the Inner Change Society's CAST Web site (www.castvancouver.org/), a "primary goal" of the substitution program is to "significantly reduce crime and disorder in Vancouver by 2010". The site states that the success of CAST "will be measured against Project Civil City goals". These include cutting "aggressive panhandling", homelessness, and the city's open drug market in half.

"What we've heard from Chinatown and the downtown-business-association people is they want to ensure that whatever is done is not going to make it [the drug problem] worse," Mulcaster said.

Chinese-language media commentator Gabriel Yiu, a onetime provincial NDP candidate, claims that the mayor's program is alienating some Chinese Canadians. "We hear more and more criticism about the way he handles things, especially the drug issue," Yiu told the Straight.

According to Yiu, some members of the community regard the drug-substitution program as worse than the four-pillars approach. "It's something that I don't think ordinary Chinese people could swallow."

Tung Chan, a former banker and city councillor, told the Straight that he is in favour of the mayor's CAST initiative. A known supporter of Sullivan, Tung is CEO of SUCCESS, the Chinatown-based United Chinese Community Enrichment Services Society. "From a social-services perspective, we always welcome anything that could do harm reduction," he said. "If [prescribing] substitution drugs is a way to lead them [addicts] to a better chance and better opportunities to rehabilitate themselves, I would support that."