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Activist aims to school Harper in drug policy
2/7/08|Georgia Straight| by Matthew Burrows

Every week for the next 52 weeks, Susan Boyd will be “educating” Prime Minister Stephen Harper about harm reduction and drug regulation by sending him a letter.

Vancouver-based Boyd is an associate professor in the studies in policy and practice program and a senior research fellow at the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C., both at the University of Victoria. She told the Georgia Straight she has been “interested in drug policy for almost 20 years” and is part of the Vancouver-based Beyond Prohibition Coalition.

Proponents of harm reduction claim it mitigates the potential dangers and health risks associated with drug use and does not focus time and effort on incarceration and criminalization.

“I became much more interested in educating him this past year, with the 2007 throne speech, 2007 budget, and his bill to bring about mandatory minimums for drug offences and trafficking,” Boyd said by phone. “So all of these issues brought together my idea that I should do something a little more public in relation to education and protest.”

Boyd is posting each of the 52 letters—the first one went out February 3—on educatingharper.com. For this on-line idea, Boyd gives credit to Spanish-born Canadian Yann Martel, author of The Life of Pi. Martel has been sending Harper a secondhand book every two weeks to promote appreciation of the arts.

Former three-term Vancouver mayor Philip Owen, also listed in the ranks of Boyd’s coalition, said Harper “doesn’t listen” on this issue.

“The words harm reduction, they simply don’t understand them,” Owen said by phone. “They have prevention, treatment, and enforcement. They have $64 million for those three pillars and nothing about harm reduction. And that is spread over two years right across the country, so that they can say, ‘Look, we just funded prevention, treatment, and harm reduction.’ ”

Boyd noted that in 2002, then–
political neophyte Larry Campbell won the Vancouver mayoral race on a drug platform that promised to carry on the work of Owen, city drug-policy coordinator Donald MacPherson, and the Four Pillars Coalition, who pushed for Insite—North America’s first
supervised injection site.

“It was an election issue here in Vancouver, and I think it could be and needs to be again,” she said. “I think it would be worthwhile to think about the larger issues connected to drug policy in relation to our tax dollars going towards police initiatives and prohibition. It’s very expensive. We would do better to look at this issue, have a legal and regulated market, and put more funding into prevention, education, and initiatives that really speak to local issues as well, instead of constantly supporting a failed policy that becomes more and more expensive.”

Boyd asserted that if drugs were legally regulated, “we would not have the type of drug-trade violence that we have experienced since prohibition began.”

Added Owen: “But the [U.S.] federal government in Washington has blinkers on, and Harper has to phone Washington to get permission to go to the bathroom, I think. He won’t make a move without talking to George Bush—not on Afghanistan or anything. But the media and the public agree with me, because it [harm reduction] is the right thing to do.”

The Web site of the Drug Prevention Network of Canada dismisses harm reduction as a philosophy that is “fatalistic and faulty at its core”. Harper thanked the network for participating in discussions when he announced his National Anti-Drug Strategy in October.

Owen said he is “pissed off” by this line of thinking.

Harper and Health Minister Tony Clement did not respond to Straight requests for an interview. Chuck Doucette, vice-president of the Ottawa-based Drug Prevention Network of Canada, did not return a call by deadline.