DON'T LET U.S. DRUG POLICY INTO CANADA

The U.S. drug czar, John Walters, is in Ottawa trying his best to put
a positive spin on one of the greatest disasters in U.S. foreign and
domestic policy. Part of his agenda is to persuade Canada to follow
in U.S. footsteps, which can only happen if Canadians ignore science,
compassion, health and human rights.

The United States ranks first in the world in per-capita
incarceration, with roughly five per cent of the earth's population
but 25 per cent of the total incarcerated population. Russia and
China simply can't keep up. Among the 2.2 million people behind bars
today in the United States, roughly half a million are locked up for
drug-law violations, and hundreds of thousands more for other
"drug-related" offences. The U.S. "war on drugs" costs at least $40
billion U.S. a year in direct costs, and tens of billions more in
indirect costs.

It's all useful information for Canadians to keep in mind when being
encouraged to further toughen their drug laws to bring them in line
with those of the United States.

What's most remarkable about U.S. drug policy is the way it endures
despite persistent evidence that it is ineffective, costly and
counterproductive. One report after another -- by the U.S. General
Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, independent
agencies and even the Bush administration itself -- consistently
fault federal drug-control programs for failing to achieve their objectives.

But funding nonetheless persists. The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance
Education) program, which relies on police to "educate" young people
about drugs, keeps being funded despite an impressive run of studies
demonstrating no effect on adolescent drug use.

Border Interdiction

Ditto for the government's border interdiction and anti-drug ad
campaigns, and its funding of federal-state anti-drug task forces,
and much else.

Drug-policy reformers in the United States have been cheered by
Canada's willingness -- at least until now -- to look to Europe
rather than the United States for drug-control models. When HIV/AIDS
started spreading a generation ago among people who inject drugs,
both Europe and Canada were quick to implement needle exchanges and
other harm-reduction programs, even as the United States opted
instead to allow hundreds of thousands to become infected and die needlessly.

Heroin-prescription trials are now underway in Montreal and
Vancouver, trying to determine whether what worked so well in
Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and other countries can also
work in Canada. The same is true of supervised injection sites, which
have proven effective in reducing fatal overdoses, transmission of
infectious diseases and drug-related nuisance. And most recently,
Vancouver's mayor, Sam Sullivan, has broken new ground by proposing
that cocaine and methamphetamine addicts be prescribed legal substitutes.

But I wonder whether Canada just can't help following in U.S.
footsteps. DARE survives in Canada too, notwithstanding evidence of
its lack of efficacy. Almost three-quarters of Canadian federal
drug-strategy spending is for law-enforcement initiatives, few of
which demonstrate any success in reducing drug problems. "While
harm-reduction interventions supported through the drug strategy are
being held to an extraordinary standard of proof," the director of
the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Dr. Julio Montaner,
recently observed, "those receiving the greatest proportion of
funding remain under-evaluated or have already proven to be ineffective."

The survival of Vancouver's supervised-injection facility is at risk,
for reasons having everything to do with politics and nothing with
science or health, while federal drug-enforcement authorities know
that all they need to do to preserve funding is make arrests and avoid scandal.

What matters most to U.S. drug czar John Walters, though, is
cannabis, which he occasionally -- and absurdly -- describes as the
most dangerous of all drugs.

Medical Purposes

Seventy per cent of Americans say cannabis should be legal for
medical purposes, and one study after another points to its efficacy
and safety as a medicine. A similar percentage also think personal
possession of marijuana should be decriminalized (i.e., resulting in
fines rather than arrest and incarceration) and 40 per cent say it
should be taxed, controlled and regulated, more or less like alcohol.

But Mr. Walters will have none of it. He travels the country, railing
against cannabis and urging schools to drug test all students,
without cause -- and without any scientific evidence that testing
will work. And when he visits or talks about Canada, it's typically
to complain -- erroneously -- that Canada is a major supplier of
marijuana for the U.S., never mind the fact that Americans now
produce most of the marijuana consumed in the United States.

Canada needs to lead, not follow, the United States when it comes to
dealing sensibly with drugs. Mr. Walters's Canadian hosts should
remind him of the 2002 report of the Canadian Senate Special
Committee on Illegal Drugs, chaired by Conservative Senator
Pierre-Claude Nolin.

It's probably the best, most comprehensive, most evidence-based
report on drug policy produced by any government in the past 30
years. And its recommendations are all about dealing with drugs as if
politics were an afterthought, and all that mattered were reducing
the harms associated with both drug use and failed drug policies. Imagine that.

Ethan Nadelmann is the founder and executive director of the Drug
Policy Alliance (www.drugpolicy.org), the leading organization in the
U.S. promoting alternatives to the war on drugs, and co-author of
Policing the Globe: Criminalization and Crime Control in
International Relations. This column first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen.