DRUG HISTORY'S SAD CENTENARY

In a little more than a week, Canada will reach a milestone that will
pass more or less unnoticed.

In the context of the continuing debate over drugs, it would be
reasonable to expect some kind of recognition that, on July 11 1908,
Parliament passed our first drug law.

It consisted of only two paragraphs and the title said it all: An Act
to Prohibit the Importation, Manufacture and Sale of Opium for Other
than Medical Purposes.

Before that, opiates and other now-illegal drugs were as freely
available as alcohol and tobacco. The world was not going to hell in
a hand basket. Those who smoked opium were almost exclusively the
Chinese who had immigrated to provide the necessary labour for the
railway and who had evolved a community of their own on the western
frontier. They caused no trouble, showed up for work on time and were
commended for their thrift.

So what led to this decision to clamp down on an activity that was,
until then, on nobody's radar -- if they'd had radar?

That question is explored in detail in Panic and Indifference: The
Politics of Canada's Drug Laws, by P.J. Giffen, Shirley Endicott and
Sylvia Lambert. Published in 1991 by the Canadian Centre on Substance
Abuse (a federal government agency, so it's hardly a manifesto from
the anti-prohibition crowd), it is an essential reference for anyone
who wants to understand how we got into this mess.

Their answer is a complex mix of three factors: a pervasive climate
of moral reform in North America, particularly on the frontiers,
assisted by a protestant-clergy-driven international movement to
restrict the use of opium; racial hostility; and the involvement of
Mackenzie King.

Moral reform was the inevitable offshoot of the conviction held by
European colonizers that their very presence here was proof of their
natural superiority. It was their duty to see to the moral well-being
of the lesser races. The growing pressure against opium use, as the
authors point out, created a situation in which "domestic action came
to be defined as a necessary complement to international measures
intended in the first instance to alleviate the [opium] problem in
China." (If they had had irony way back then, they would have noted
that the Chinese had been introduced to opium by their British colonizers.)

Racial hostility grew slowly but steadily, from the time of the
arrival of the first Chinese looking for a new life in the Fraser
River gold rush of the mid-1850s, until the anti-Asian riots in
Vancouver in 1907. The many myths generated by white xenophobia were
dominated by fears of sexual predation and perversion.

Enter Mackenzie King, no slouch as a moralist himself. As deputy
minister of labour, he was sent here by Laurier to negotiate
reparations for losses suffered by the Chinese and Japanese in the
riots. While here, the local Anti-Opium League bent his ear and he
returned to Ottawa with some very strong opinions about curbing opium
use. Bolstered by the other factors, he was persuasive, and a bill
was drafted. One concession was made: opium distributors would have a
six-month grace period to unload their existing stocks. The "debate"
in the House lasted less than five minutes and, in the blink of a
strobe light, we started down our destructive path to nowhere.

As early as 1885, a Royal Commission had heard from some objective
observers of B.C. society (as opposed to police officers and
Presbyterian ministers, who also testified) about the comparatively
benign nature of opium use. Chief Justice Matthew Bailey Begbie said,
". . . all the evils arising from opium in British Columbia in a year
do not, probably, equal the damage, trouble and expense occasioned to
individuals and to the state by whiskey in a single month or perhaps
in some single night." Mr. Justice Crease of the B.C. Supreme Court
made the same point: ". . . white vice and depravity are far ahead,
more insidious, more alluring, more permanently injurious" than opium
smoking by the Chinese.

Never underestimate the power of righteousness. In full flower, it
can lay low entire segments of a society in the name of some moral
quest, one which usually translates into what the seeker has decided
is best for everyone. That's what the moralists did with Criminal
Code prohibitions against contraception, homosexuality, gambling and
a number of other perceived "evils." Eventually, they had to
backtrack and repeal those laws.

Five long years ago, a judge of the B.C. Court of Appeal was heard to
say, with respect to a raid on a grow-op, that, "I have not yet
abandoned my conviction that Parliament has a Constitutional right to
be hoodwinked, as it was in the '20s and '30s, by the propaganda
against marihuana, and to remain hoodwinked."

Very true. But when the damage flowing from being hoodwinked becomes
and remains so manifest, that same government fails in its primary
duty to protect the safety and security of its citizens if it doesn't
act to undo the harm it has created.

This centenary is a good time to start undoing the destruction
generated by a century of drug prohibition. In those 100 years, drugs
have become more available, more potent and less expensive than they
ever were. Their quality and distribution has been left in the hands
of criminals; and the black market has led to an unstoppable wave of
petty property crime to meet its demands and routine explosions of
violence to maintain status within it. The percentage of users of all
drugs who become addicted remains at around three per cent, the same
proportion that was estimated in 1908. And all of that in spite of
countless billions spent over the decades on enforcement and interdiction.

Let's end this.