Doing Drugs the Right Way

Nestled between soaring mountains and the ocean, Vancouver is as pleasant a city as you'll ever find - especially if you're an illegal drug user. Beset in recent years by a flood of narcotics accompanied by surging overdoses and HIV infections, Canada's third-largest city has radically overhauled its police and social services practices to reframe drug use as primarily a public health issue, not a criminal one. Result: Vancouver is now by far the continent's most drug-tolerant city, launching an experiment dramatically at odds with the bitter War on Drugs waged by its southern neighbor.

Marijuana has been effectively decriminalized. The famous "B.C. bud", rivaled in potency only by California's finest, is sold and smoked so openly that the city has earned the nickname "Vansterdam". The city has taken an even more surprising approach to harder drugs. It runs the biggest needle exchange program in North America. It recently opened the continent's only "safe injection" site, where addicts can shoot up in a supervised setting. If that weren't enough, municipal health officials recently began handing out prescription injectable heroin to addicts, and clean mouthpieces for crack pipes.

This enthusiastic embrace of what is known as the "harm reduction" approach to substance abuse is a world away from the U.S., where punishment is the preferred response. Mandatory minimum sentencing and "three strikes" laws have sent the number of drug offenders in our prisons skyrocketing in recent years; there are more inmates locked up now on narcotics charges - over half a million - than the total of ALL prisoners in 1980. The cost: billions of dollars annually. The benefit: practically none. Most offenders are released with their addictions untreated and soon wind up back behind bars.

In Vancouver, meanwhile, the early indicators are much more encouraging. Nearly 600 people a day are now using the safe injection site. Overdose deaths, which averaged 147 a year in the 1990s, have dropped by almost half. And infection rates for HIV/AIDS and hepatitis C have both plummeted.

At the same time, however, other drug-related problems are getting worse. Increasingly violent gangs battling for control of the trade have claimed over 60 lives in the past six years - major carnage by the standards of this generally peaceful town. Methamphetamine seizures have grown tenfold. Surveys report that drug use is higher in British Columbia than in the rest of Canada, and that almost half of all Vancouverites consider drugs a major problem in their communities - a figure double that for residents of Canada's biggest cities, Toronto and Montreal.

Vancouver, in short, has essentially become a gigantic field-test for harm reduction policies, a million-person laboratory half an hour's drive from the U.S. that is yielding valuable lessons on the costs and benefits of such a strategy - lessons that American policy makers and activists alike should be studying carefully.

The whole experiment is under growing pressure. Canada's recently elected Conservative prime minister has vowed to take a harder line on drugs, and has specifically denounced Vancouver's safe injection site. The Bush administration is cheering him on. To them, Vancouver sets a dangerous example of tolerance for illegal substances. In fact, it's providing an unprecedented opportunity for Americans to see what strategies might actually work as alternatives to our own decades-long and still losing battle with drugs.