FUTILE DRUG WAR CAN'T DEFEAT HUMAN NATURE

Awaiting the next inevitable crackle of gangbanger gunfire, city
police lament the silence. Omerta -- the criminal code of silence --
conspires against them, as does a revolving-door legal system, they say.

A growing number of ex-cops, prosecutors and judges are convinced
none of those frustrations would even rear their heads if the most
obvious solution to the drug-driven gang malevolence was adopted.

After 28 years as a provincial court judge in the Vancouver area,
Jerry Paradis is convinced drug prohibition ensures police will have
their hands full of greedmongering killers.

He's seen much of it in Vancouver and expresses a weary familiarity
to similar tales in Calgary and Edmonton.

"Right now, it's leaving the law of supply and demand to the
criminals," says Paradis, who retired in 2003.

When he first joined the group Law Enforcement Against Prohibition
(LEAP), Paradis admits the reaction from colleagues was often hostile.

"Since then, I've seen a sea-change," he says. "The cliche is
thinking outside the box, but the reality is all of us have been
boxed in by orthodoxy."

A few shootings ago, Calgary police Staff Sgt. Rick Tuza was
confronted with the same questions.

"Why is there such a demand for these drugs? I don't get it," he
asks, adding those who purchase the drugs support dope profiteers.

That's exactly the point, replies Paradis.

Legalizing and regulating even hard drugs such as cocaine and heroin
would cut the dealers off at their knees. Besides, he says, "there's
always a demand for these drugs, there always will be a demand."
Police say some of the latest gang shootings in Calgary have been
bloody personal vendettas. But the departure point for all the
aggression is drugs, mainly cocaine.

Jack Cole has seen it all as a 14-year undercover narc with the New
Jersey state police. Jaded by the hypocrisy, lies and futility after
just three years, Cole eventually turned his back on the drug war and
pleads for Canadians not to follow his country's failed path. But
it's already too late.

"You can't arrest your way out of this problem," says LEAP member
Cole, 69. "We've spent more than a trillion tax dollars and have six
times per capita the prison population of China ... drugs in the U.S.
are cheaper, more potent and easier for our children to get than when
I was buying them as an undercover officer in the 1970s."

In fact, prohibition has been big business for criminals. It has
artificially inflated the street prices of substances such as
cocaine, sometimes by 17,000% above the value at its source. It's
lucrative enough for today's Al Capones to kill for precisely because
it's illegal.

But in one area of Switzerland, says Cole, the legal supply of heroin
has virtually cleansed it of pushers and lowered the number of users.
"The dope dealers aren't in their communities enticing them with the
needle," says Cole.

In a Canada where even marijuana decriminalization remains out of
reach, it's beyond radical to believe hard drugs would ever go legal.
Tolerating gangster bloodshed is considered politically safer.

In some of those enlightened European countries, the tide is even
turning towards a harder stance. Cole scoffs at such talk, given the
underlying, obvious truth.

"Prohibition is not a failure, it's a self-perpetuating policy
disaster," he says. And it will remain so, well beyond the foreseeable future.