WHY THE WAR ON DRUGS ISN'T WORKING

Damage Done Is The Smartest Documentary Yet On A Divisive Subject,
With A Clear Message That Change Is Needed

In all the documentaries about the stupidities of the war against
drugs, the smartest documentary yet may well be Damage Done: The Drug
War Odyssey.

What sets Damage Done apart is the way it approaches the issue.
Connie Littlefield's documentary, for example, doesn't interview the
usual suspects. It doesn't include all those you'd expect to be in
favour of drugs such as Marc Emery talking about being targeted by
the U.S. federal government for selling marijuana seeds through the
mail to U.S. customers, members of the B.C. Compassion Club pointing
out the medicinal benefits of cannabis, or protesters snubbing
authority by smoking up at the annual Smoke-In.

Instead, Damage Done takes a much more subversive approach by talking
to police officers and justice officials, the assault troops on the
front lines of the drug war. As members of Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition, their story is depressingly familiar: almost without
exception, they started out as true believers in the war but ended up
coming to the realization that they were just part of a drug
enforcement industry that thrives on keeping drugs illegal.

Their message? Our current system of drug prohibition doesn't work
and needs to change.

The police officers now speaking out in favour of repealing
prohibition include Norm Stamper, former Seattle police chief,
Vancouver's own Larry Campbell, a former RCMP officer who as mayor
successfully lobbied to open Insite, North America's first legal
injection site, and Frank Serpico, the New York cop whose refusal to
be sucked into the department's endemic corruption nearly cost him
his life and resulted in a book and a Hollywood movie about his
courageous stand.

"I think we have to stop this hypocrisy," Serpico says in the
documentary, referring to the huge class disparity between
street-level criminals who get busted for using, while Wall Street
executives order and use their designer drugs with impunity.

A name you've probably never heard of is John Gayder. He's an officer
with Ontario Parks Police who has sacrificed career advancement for
speaking out against drug prohibition. Gayder says many more police
officers believe exactly as he does but are afraid to speak out.
After seeing a documentary such as Damage Done, maybe more police
officers will do the same as Gayder and stop turning an addiction
problem into a criminal one.

Sponsored by the National Film Board, Damage Done is full of comments
and observations about the war on drugs that hit you with the ring of
authenticity: more than 38 years after former U.S. president Richard
Nixon officially started the War on Drugs, North America now has more
drugs at lower prices than ever before; police corruption is largely
the result of the insanely huge amounts of money that organized crime
has to spread around; just as alcohol prohibition in the U.S. in the
1920s was responsible for creating gangsters such as Al Capone, so
too is drug prohibition largely responsible for allowing organized
crime to flourish today; and North America's huge appetite for
illegal drugs doesn't come from addicts but from occasional users.

Damage Done is being shown this Sunday with a second film called
Waiting to Inhale: Marijuana, Medicine and the Law in the No More
Drug War Double Bill Film Festival at the Vancity Theatre at 12:30
p.m. The festival is organized by the B.C. Compassion Club and the
Vancouver Island Compassion Society to promote a dialogue on a
national drug policy based on rational evidence.

Waiting to Inhale, directed by Jed Riffe, looks at the debate in the
U.S. over treating marijuana as a medicine and the evidence to
support claims that marijuana relieves the symptoms of people
diagnosed with AIDS, cancer and multiple sclerosis.

After the screenings, there will be a panel discussion with both
directors as well as former mayor Larry Campbell and Jerry Paradis, a
former B.C. Provincial Court judge and LEAP member.

The double-bill film festival is one of the events being organized to
mark the B.C. Compassion Club's 10th anniversary in May as the
largest and oldest compassion club in the country. Also in May, the
VICS takes on the federal government in a constitutional challenge of
Health Canada's Medical Marijuana Program that prohibits compassion
clubs from growing their own marijuana for medicinal use.

At A Glance

Damage Done and Waiting to Inhale: Marijuana, Medicine and the Law
are being shown as part of the No More Drug War Double Bill Film
Festival, 12:30 p.m. Sunday, Vancity Theatre at the Vancouver
International Film Centre, 1181 Seymour at Davie.

For more information, visit www.thecompassionclub.org