Vancouver mayor proposes 'revolutionary' plan for addicts

Vancouver's Mayor is promoting his plan for stimulant maintenance again and calling it treatment. This is the same guy who suggested that addicts and the public need to get real and accept addiction as a permanent disability, like his experience of having to accept his spinal cord injury and life in a wheel chair.

Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan is lobbying the federal government for an exemption from Canada's narcotics laws that would allow what he calls a "revolutionary" alternative drug-treatment plan to give substitute drugs to at least 700 cocaine and crystal-meth addicts.

If he is successful, Vancouver would be a global pioneer in running such a large-scale program of drug maintenance for stimulant-drug users.

Sullivan said the drug plan, along with three other key elements that have to come from Ottawa or Victoria, will eliminate most of Vancouver's problems with homelessness, panhandling and drug-dealing. Those are the three social problems he promised to reduce by half in time for 2010 in the Project Civil City initiative that he launched in November.