UN chews out Canada for offering free drug gear

The United Nations drug control board has slammed three Canadian programs that provide safe crack pipes and injection sites to drug addicts.

The government-funded programs in Vancouver, Ottawa and Toronto are in contravention of a worldwide anti-drug convention that Canada signed in 1988, the International Narcotics Control Board said in its annual report, released Wednesday. The INCB is the independent and quasi-judicial monitoring body that implements the UN's drug-control conventions.

"The Board calls upon the Government of Canada to end programmes, such as the supply of 'safer crack kits,' including the mouthpiece and screen components of pipes for smoking 'crack,' " the control board's report says.

"The distribution of drug paraphernalia, including crack pipes, to drug users in Ottawa and Toronto, as well as the presence of drug injection sites is also in violation of the international drug control treaties, to which Canada is a party."