THREAT REASSESSMENT

Police arrested three people last week for smuggling the controlled
substance khat into Canada through the Ottawa airport. This was not a triumph.

Khat is a leafy plant that grows in east Africa, where many people
chew it as a mild stimulant and as a social drug, akin to
after-dinner coffee. It has to be consumed fresh to get the full effect.

The active chemical is different, but like coffee, khat has some
negative effects: It stains teeth, and can cause constipation and
insomnia. The stuff hasn't been closely studied, but a recent British
examination concluded that khat is less dangerous than alcohol or
tobacco (and certainly less addictive), and while it can be abused as
alcohol can, the British government has no law controlling its use.

In many other countries, including Canada, it's illegal. According to
police, the smuggling ring at the Ottawa airport used a scheme that
hinged on a baggage handler moving bags coming from the U.K. onto the
domestic-arrivals belt to avoid customs inspection.

This is a serious security problem, a breach of the law, and the
authorities were right to put an end to it.

On the scale of serious social threats, however, khat ranks near the
bottom, as even the officers involved in the arrests in Ottawa seemed
to acknowledge.

The ring could have used its methods to smuggle much worse things
into the country, RCMP Supt. Mike Gaudreau told a news conference,
and "dismantling this group puts an end to that potential."

Hold it right there. Assuming the police can prove their allegations,
this ring existed only because khat is illegal in Canada. It wasn't a
free-standing criminal organization looking for illicit goods to move
through the Ottawa airport, sustaining itself in the khat business
until the market for plutonium heats up again.

The harder the police push on khat-smugglers, the worse the situation
will get. They estimate the price of the 1,788 bundles of khat leaves
they stopped at about $171,000, so about $100 each.

If police raids pushed the price to $1,000 a bundle by stopping a lot
more shipments, smugglers would have an incentive to get much more
daring and clever, and to protect their operations with violence. If
khat could be imported like whisky (or spinach, for that matter),
there'd be no potential threat to be concerned about.

This is the circular logic of the drug war in action. We ban some
drugs not because there's any objective reason to keep them out of
reasonable adults' hands, but because of the mechanisms used to get
them into the country ... which wouldn't be there if the drugs
themselves weren't banned.

Perhaps the police felt they had to support the law they enforced,
having spent a whole year stalking the three-person khat-smuggling
ring after somebody tipped them off that something was up.

Admitting the truth, that the operation was a waste of everyone's
time, would be far too embarrassing.

By all means announce the arrests -- the police should inform the
public about what they are doing -- but they should leave the
justification of a misguided policy to politicians.