Thank you for the opportunity to be here today to speak about illegal narcotics, emphasizing harm reduction and the supervised injection site, Insite, in Vancouver. It is difficult to cover this huge subject comprehensively in five minutes, but I will try.
Vancouver City Council unanimously passed an 85-page document called A Framework for Action in May 2001, seven years ago. It's a four-pillar approach to Vancouver's drug problems, and it emphasizes prevention, treatment, enforcement, and, most importantly, harm reduction—the four pillars.
This document is still intact, it is still accepted, and no one who has read this or commented on it has said to throw out this or that part, or that this is wrong, or that this assumption is wrong. It's an 85-page document; it's the foundation of our success in Vancouver.
All the harm reduction programs, facilities, and initiatives are essential and have proven to be justified and successful in this regard. The supervised injection site—I want to emphasize this—is just one of the many tools in drug policy reform. People think this whole thing revolves around the supervised injection site. I will explain the many other important aspects in a few minutes.
Harm reduction and a supervised injection site are cost-effective and they save lives. They improve public health and public order. What is the biggest problem we have in our cities today? Public health and public order. Think about the volume of money rolling around and getting in the hands of people who shouldn't have it. We must engage the addict and develop an exit strategy. That is the goal: to rescue these people.
These people start using drugs for a variety of reasons, and therefore many services are needed for them to change their lifestyle. The user is sick. And we have a national health care system. That's something we have to think about; it's a health issue, public health, public order. The user is sick, no question about it.
The goal of drug reform is abstinence. I hear over and over again that this whole issue is to enable and encourage the use of drugs, and that's not what it's about at all. The goal is to rescue, get them in the health care system, and create an abstinence-based program for users.
The war on drugs has failed in Canada and the United States. That's an absolute fact. I haven't time to prove it, but it's true. We cannot afford it any more. We cannot incarcerate our way out of this. People who have worked on the war on drugs--and I emphasize that--think you can incarcerate your way out of this. You cannot. You have to listen to the mayors. We should not be allowing more death, disease, crime, and suffering.
In June 2007, the United States mayors had their annual meeting in Los Angeles; 220 mayors were there. Rocky Anderson, the mayor of Salt Lake City, Mormon country, put forward a motion on the floor of that convention, and all the major mayors were there. The motion was that the war on drugs had failed. What was the vote? Two hundred and twenty to nothing. Every single mayor who was there said the war on drugs had failed. So we have to get down to the municipal level to find out what's really going on and get close to the reality.
We have to ask ourselves, are the current drug laws working? No. Are they effective? No. Do they make any sense? No, not at all.
There are over 100 supervised injection sites in over 50 cities in the world. I could talk to you about my discussions with the mayor of Frankfurt, Germany, and the mayor of Sydney, Australia. I've been to five international conferences in Europe. I've been to Kabul, Afghanistan; New York; around the United States; Stanford University; and across this country. I've visited lots of these supervised injection sites.
The media in Canada are playing up the fact that this is the only one in North America; therefore it's unique. That is not true. They've been in Switzerland for over 20 years and are very successful. You couldn't close the one in Frankfurt, Germany, or in Sydney, Australia.
How bad does it have to get before we act on drug policy reform? The operative word here, as I said earlier, is to develop an exit strategy that's abstinence-based.
The third main issue is engagement--