AN IRRATIONAL AND STUPID DRUG POLICY

The government's handling of drug policy is so ignorant and foolish
it is a challenge to explain why in a newspaper column. To expound on
stupidity of this magnitude requires a very long book.

But two images from this week do come close to capturing the full absurdity.

The first is Tony Clement appearing before a Commons committee to
declare his government's opposition to the current operation of
Insite, the Vancouver safe-injection pilot project.

"In my opinion, supervised injection is not medicine," the minister
told the committee. "It does not heal the person addicted to drugs."

The government wants to focus on treating addicts, the minister of
health said, and preventing people from using drugs in the first place.

For anyone unfamiliar with drug policy, this sounds sweetly
reasonable. Why, of course we should help get addicts off drugs! Why,
yes, it would be best if we stopped people from using drugs at all!
Who could possibly disagree?

People who actually know something about drugs and drug addiction, that's who.

The reason why harm reduction policies like Insite came into
existence is precisely because treatment routinely fails. Even the
best treatment. Even if it's lavishly funded. Some addicts will keep
using -- for another year, for another decade, for the rest of their
lives. Harm reduction is about keeping those people alive and healthy
until they do kick their habits, or, in the case of the few who never
will, keeping them alive and healthy and not spreading disease and disorder.

I've seen it at work in the Netherlands. Imagine healthy heroin
addicts. With jobs. And apartments. And families. Addicts who are not
a blight on the community. It's all thanks to an array of harm
reduction programs which this country is too timid to even try.

I've also seen how addicts live in the United States, the western
country that has most vigorously rejected harm reduction -- and the
western country with the highest drug-related fatality rate.

As for prevention, well, that's a terrific idea. Except that real
prevention means dealing with the social decay -- broken families,
mental illness, illiteracy -- that promotes drug abuse. This
government seems to think prevention means running television
commercials as vapid and worthless as the Reagan-era "this is your
brain on drugs" ad that is the classic of the genre.

There's also some rich historical irony in Mr. Clement's comment
about the safe-injection facility not being medicine because it
doesn't get addicts off drugs. That's precisely what the U.S. Supreme
Court said in March, 1919, when it banned "maintenance" programs --
which involved doctors prescribing the drug to which patients were addicted.

A major factor in the court's thinking was the widespread belief at
the time that addiction could be cured easily thanks to a marvelous
treatment invented by Charles B. Towns, a failed stockbroker.
Unfortunately, it was realized not long after the ruling that Towns
was a quack. But by then, it was too late. All maintenance programs
had been shut down and the drug problems we are now so familiar with
- -- black markets, violence, disease -- sprouted in American cities.

In the United Kingdom, by contrast, maintenance remained the central
policy for another 45 years. In all that time, the underworld drug
scene scarcely existed.

Of course, Mr. Clement probably thinks this is all ancient history.
Who cares, right? Well, this history is being repeated.

Every decade or two in this country, there's another scare about
drugs. And every decade or two, the government quickly and firmly
rejects real alternatives to the status quo. And every decade or two
ministers and police chiefs tell parliamentary committees that the
solution is prevention, treatment and law enforcement -- and they say
this with all the wide-eyed enthusiasm of ignoramuses who think they
are the first to ever utter these sparkling words.

So there was Tony Clement on Thursday doing the same old song and
dance before yet another parliamentary committee. Whether he knew how
silly he sounded promising change in the form of a nearly
one-century-old status quo, I cannot say. I doubt it. His wide-eyed
enthusiasm looked only too genuine.

That was the first of the two images I promised at the outset of this
column. The other? It's the military's latest recruiting ad.

Picture this: A warship rushes toward an unidentified vessel, where
men are seen hurriedly pushing large containers overboard. Heavily
armed soldiers storm aboard. Evil-doers are taken down at gunpoint.
Cut to a press conference where an official shows off seized drugs.
"Fight chaos," the tagline reads.

The overwhelming majority of the money Canada spends on drug policy
goes to law enforcement. And that's not including what the Defence
Department spends. I don't know how much it costs to send a warship
out on patrol for a day, but I suspect it could keep Insite open for a year.

Insite, however, is supported by peer-reviewed scientific research.
There is shockingly little evidence that law enforcement actually
accomplishes what it's supposed to. In fact, lots of experts think it
does vastly more harm than good -- that it doesn't "fight chaos" so
much as "spread chaos."

So this week we saw a minister call for the closure of an inexpensive
facility whose positive effects are supported by solid research. At
the same time, the military called for new recruits to join a war on
drugs that has never been properly researched and subjected to a
cost-benefit analysis -- and that would surely fail miserably if it were.

That is Canadian drug policy summarized in two wretched images.

Dan Gardner writes Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.