PUT THE GANGS OUT OF BUSINESS: LEGALIZE DRUGS

Childhood and adolescence should rightfully be a time of love,
learning and life. But for thousands of young Canadians, their
journey to adulthood is marred forever by street-gang involvement,
which almost always means an active role in the massive business of
illicit street drugs, too.

I have seen and heard of too many cases to count demonstrating the
connection between gangs, drugs and youth. Consider these:
eight-year-old gangsters on BMX bikes dealing crack and crystal meth
in North Winnipeg; 14-year-old gangsters on the west coast, driving
prepaid rental cars for $100 per eight hour shift, delivering drugs
through widespread dial-a-dope operations; 16-year-old First Nations
gang members travelling from big cities to remote James Bay
communities selling "dime bags" of marijuana cut with oregano for
$50, five times the going street price in the south; young Ontario
and Quebec ecstasy cooks making colourful $20 pills of uncertain
composition for the urban club scene, thus generating massive profits
for their street-gang masters; and murder after countless murder of
young men in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver, a majority associated
with street gangs and the drug trade.

Many allocate blame to street gangsters for this sorry state of
affairs -- the idea being that if it weren't for these aggressive and
money-hungry "pushers," we wouldn't have such a problem. However,
this reasoning is incomplete: It fails to consider the demand
generated by millions of Canadians of all ages who, at least once
this year, will act on their desire and make a back-alley purchase of
an illicit drug.

Millions -- that's right: So says Health Canada and the Canadian
Centre on Substance Abuse in their March, 2005 Canadian Addiction
Survey. Despite prohibitory laws, societal scorn, unsavoury gangster
salesmen, the risk of debilitating addiction and dubiously doctored
substances, millions of willing consumers are supporting thousands of
willing sellers -- street gangsters, that is -- across the country.
And with consumption rates for many illicit drugs having doubled or
tripled in the past 15 years, it's clear that the drug problem, and
therefore the gang problem, is about to get a lot worse.

This should come as no surprise to anyone concerned about street
gangs in the dozens of Canadian communities where they are active. If
you're young, poor, marginalized, inadequately supervised, surrounded
by violence and neglect in crumbling communities, and consider your
economic prospects to be stark or non-existent, the pull of the gang
can be quite magnetic. The street gang offers troubled youth a
family, a contrived identity, a perverse form of "love," a gritty
rite of passage, protection and excitement. Perhaps most compelling,
it offers young gangsters the chance, however dangerous, to make
money, and quite possibly lots of it, in a giant and growing street
tournament called the drug trade, lubricated by demand from everyday Canadians.

The street gang and associated drug trade problem in Canada won't be
solved by a get-tough, criminal-justice-system response, nor should
we expect young homies to just say no. Look to the United States for
proof of this. Over the past 30 years, the U.S. has employed the most
aggressive and expensive anti-drug and -gang measures ever conceived.
In the process, 800,000 street gangsters under the age of 21 have
been created. Moreover, more than two million Americans now call
prison home, the majority of which are young black and Hispanic men.
About half of them are serving time for relatively minor drug
offences. Today, things are so bad that the FBI has made street gangs
and the underlying drug trade their number one priority, even over
domestic terrorism. The failure in this campaign is a testament to
the abject failure of the U.S. war on drugs and gangs.

Canada has the opportunity, but perhaps not the courage, to employ a
different approach on street gangs. To be sure, we must tackle the
underlying socioeconomic causes of the street-gang problem, including
poverty, income inequality and persistent discrimination. At the same
time, we must equip our police agencies with the resources they need
to take out the hardcore 20% or so of all street gangsters who are
responsible for the majority of Canadian street violence. We must
spend much more money on early prevention and diversion, because this
is not a problem that we can arrest our way out of.

Finally, we need to embark upon drug legalization, which will starve
gangs of their principal oxygen supply and serve to upset the
attractive risk-reward proposition that every new gangster now faces.

Rather than continue to incur only the massive costs of the drug
trade -- addictions, policing, corrections and loss of life -- why
not also capture the massive financial benefit (over $400-billion in
North America alone), which we presently reserve for the exclusive
enjoyment of street gangs and other criminal organizations?

Like other drugs we deem socially acceptable -- nicotine delivered in
cigarettes and alcohol for instance, which collectively kill about
50,000 Canadians every year -- we ought to control the production and
distribution of illicit drugs and tax their consumption.

Let's start with cannabis, Canada's favourite drug by far. This move
alone will generate a multi-billion dollar fiscal dividend that can
be used to cover the costs we now incur despite prohibition, enforce
more stringent laws against sales to minors, and invigorate Canada's
meagre prevention and harm-reduction initiatives. This step would
also go far to restoring public trust in law enforcement, which has
been diminished by their involvement in imposing futile drug laws.

There is no contradiction in being pro-drug-reform yet anti-drug use.
In its present form, the war on drugs is both bad public policy and a
fight we cannot win. All drug users should have the right to harm
themselves if they so choose. Recognizing that we cannot eliminate
their demand, I would much prefer that drug users purchase their
wares in a controlled setting rather than from young gangsters, who
effectively control what gets sold, where it gets sold and to whom it
gets sold.

Absent a robust underground trade in drugs, just how are Canada's
estimated 14,000 street gangsters going to make sufficient money to
offset the dangers inherent in the job of gangster? Sure, they may
turn to other criminal enterprise, but there is not another in the
world so alluring, so profitable, so vibrant, than the drug trade.
Drug reform will not solve the drug problem entirely. But it will go
a long way to solving what has been termed the "drug-problem
problem," which is the pull of the gang and its associated crime and violence.