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Vancouver’s NPA-led city council looks set to approve permanent funding for the city’s drug policy czar.

“We’ve concluded that we might as well keep it going indefinitely,” said Coun. Suzanne Anton, whose centre-right Non-Partisan Association has a majority on council. “If you ever manage to solve the drug problem, then the program could come to an end. But I don’t think anyone sees that happening in the next couple of years.”

City council approved a position for drug policy coordinator Donald MacPherson in 2000, but funding has always been year-to-year.

MacPherson actually made the same request during the budget process earlier this year, but council voted to hold off on a decision in what was a particularly tight fiscal year. What's changed in only six months?

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"I will say nothing has changed," Anton said. "Most of us [councillors] were new, you have to remember. I think it was more of a matter of figuring out how the land lay at council."

The city could actually have saved $10,000 by approving the program then; the new funding request calls for $330,000 annually, more than the $320,000 first requested in April.

MacPherson was one of the key players in Vancouver’s adoption of the sometimes-controversial Four Pillars drug strategy, which advocates, in part, for harm reduction initiatives like the supervised heroin injection site.

Future policy plans for MacPherson's soon-to-be permanent drug policy program include reports on mental health among the city's vulnerable - at least one-third of Vancouver's street homeless are thought to suffer from mental illness - and an evaluation of possible maintenance or substitution programs.

Earlier this year, MacPherson suggested the city should take a closer look at giving red wine to hard core street alcoholics in such a substitution program.

Tags: vancouver, drug policy, downtown eastside