WE CAN'T WIN DRUG WAR WITH JUST POLICE: FORUM

Delegates Work To Revise UN Drug Policy

A United Nations forum on drug policy yesterday agreed that
"over-reliance on law enforcement" causes deaths, fuels crime and
unfairly targets "poor people of colour."

Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen said after the Beyond 2008
conference in Vancouver that "drug-policy reform won the day because
most rational people on the front lines realize that the war on drugs
has been a miserable failure."

The conference drew about 80 delegates from all over North America
and is one of several being held worldwide before a drug-policy
discussion slated for Vienna this July.

Owen, the architect of Vancouver's four-pillar drug strategy based on
prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement, noted that the
"old-school prohibition crowd also had its say."

"There are still those, in the U.S. and in our federal government,
who say drug users are criminals and should get a job, pay taxes and
salute the flag," he said.

He insisted that community attitudes are dramatically shifting.

He noted that 220 U.S. mayors at a conference last June "agreed
unanimously the war on drugs is not working."

"Mayors are close to the issue so they actually see the drug users as
people who are ill and need treatment, and they have to deal with
related crime, yet it's our federal government that controls
narcotics," Owen said.

He blasted Ottawa for "spending $64 million spread over two years for
every province in Canada for prevention, treatment and enforcement of
drug policy -- which is just insulting. It's just pennies."

He noted there are 45,000 deaths each year in Canada linked to
alcohol and tobacco, which are legal.

"How many die of marijuana? None," he said. "If government regulated
and taxed marijuana and other drugs, then we'd at least get money for
health and social programs, including drug treatment, detox and prevention."

Forum organizers noted that "over-reliance on law enforcement"
criminalizes drug users unnecessarily, "fuels the drug economy and
the black market, aids organized crime and terrorists [dependent on
income from drug crops] and disproportionately targets poor people of colour."

Forum co-sponsor Gillian Maxwell of Keeping the Door Open: Dialogues
on Drug Use, said most conference delegates who visited Insite,
Vancouver's safe-injection site, "were very positive."

Chris Livingstone of the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society
agreed with forum findings that "First Nations people suffer
disproportionate harm."

"All of the punishment and prohibition policies lead to
criminalization and deaths -- we can't get any funding to continue
our alley patrols where we saved people from overdose deaths."