Inside Vancouver
Fixed
By Paul Webster published Jan 1, 2009
Long before the Insite supervised-injection site survived a federal appeal to close it, the Harper government wasted millions and alienated academe in its campaign to shut it down
Thomas Kerr reached the top of the politics-laced field of addiction research at an age when he was still undimmed by academic apathy. Square-jawed and rapid-talking, the 41-year-old UBC epidemiologist has something of a boxer's poise. When he talks about his research into hard-drug use in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, his anger surfaces in flashes of acerbic wit and penetrating knowledge. Among academics and street people alike, Kerr is usually the smartest guy in the room-and, perhaps, the toughest. But he admits that what he encountered last May on Parliament Hill in Ottawa was more than he'd bargained for: "It was like an event that makes you question your faith in God," Kerr recalled over a burger and a beer at a Vancouver restaurant six months later. "It was absolutely, without a doubt, the lowest point in my career."
Invited to talk to federal politicians last spring, Kerr jumped at the chance. He'd been to Ottawa a few months earlier to accept one of the country's highest medical-science awards. Now he was being invited back for a rare chance to speak with lawmakers. "Federal taxpayers paid millions for our research into drug treatment," Kerr reasoned. "So it made perfect sense MPs should know the results."
Over the past decade, Kerr-who does most of the talking for a small team of scientists within UBC's Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS-has co-authored hundreds of studies praised by AIDS researchers around the globe. Those studies not only made his scientific name, they helped propel the centre's leader, Julio Montaner, to the presidency of the world's leading AIDS research organization, the International AIDS Society. As the UBC team gained global fame, Kerr and Montaner began urging Ottawa to overhaul the way it looks at drug control. Those calls helped win federal support in 2003 for Insite, North America's first government-approved and -financed supervised-injection facility. Since then, the UBC team has carefully studied its impacts on addicts. "I headed for Ottawa," said Kerr, "thinking federal politicians wanted to know what we've learned."
