HOW TO CUT THE CRIME RATE: LEGALIZE DRUGS

VICTORIA - Last week's column touched on crime rates around the
province, which the B.C. government tracks by health region.

If you look at violent crime, serious property crime and non-cannabis
drug crime, the safest place to live in B.C. is Vancouver Island.
Next best is the Interior region, which encompasses the Kootenays,
Okanagan and Cariboo.

In the middle of the pack is the Fraser region, the largest in the
province by population, extending from Burnaby through the Fraser
Valley to Hope, and including the Tri-Cities.

Second worst is the vast Northern region, which includes roughly the
top two thirds of the province. And the highest serious crime rates
are in Vancouver Coastal, which includes Vancouver, Richmond, the
North Shore and Sunshine Coast.

The good news is that the rate of serious crime has been going down
in most parts of the province, the exception being the North, where
serious crime went up by more than 8% from 2001 to '04.

The bad news, as I'm reminded by a new discussion paper just released
by the BC Progress Board, is that despite improvements in recent
years, B.C. still ranks in the top third of Canadian provinces in all
categories of major crime. We also have more property crime per
capita than the neighbouring states of Washington and Oregon.

The discussion paper, prepared by Simon Fraser University criminology
professors Robert Gordon and Bryan Kinney, contains some provocative
suggestions. When it comes to illegal drugs, for example, the
professors conclude that B.C. has only three choices:

* Lobby the federal government to legalize the drug trade,
controlling it as tobacco and alcohol are regulated today.

* Eliminate the organized criminal drug trade by way of a major
expenditure on new police teams, legislation targeting money
laundering and proceeds of crime, increased penalties and
construction of new jails.

* Combine options one and two, with a crackdown on organized crime
followed by a phased-in decriminalization and legalization.

Of course, the Conservative government in Ottawa will embrace
legalization about the same time hell opens for public skating. Prime
Minister Stephen Harper is reputed to be a libertarian at heart but
his justice and public safety posse, Vic Toews and Stock Day, are
hang-'em high "social conservatives" who were appointed to play to
the party's older support base, and would likely only support
increased drug penalties.

(As a small-L libertarian myself, I disagree with that approach but
it's preferable to the previous government, which repeatedly promised
to decriminalize pot but never followed through while opening its own
low-grade grow op in an abandoned mine.)

The criminologists argue that legalizing drugs isn't likely to
increase demand much more. If people want drugs in today's society,
they will find a way to get them, or manufacture even worse
substitutes like crystal meth.

Nearly all the street crime - the car and house break-ins with which
ordinary people are all too familiar - is perpetrated in the pursuit
of drugs. As for violent crime, if you take away the drug-related
shootings and stabbings, you're left mainly with those crimes of
passion that are themselves so often committed in a fog of intoxication.

The report warns that there is a fourth option, which is to maintain
the status quo. For B.C., that means continuing to have Canada's most
lenient courts, which combines with a relatively benign climate to
make B.C. the destination of choice for Canada's sophisticated criminals.

As things stand, B.C. has twice the rate of drug crime as any other
province. And since legalization is currently not a viable option
politically, the practical choice would be to increase sentences for
major drug crime.

The 'Four Pillars'

The SFU report endorses what has become known as the "four pillars"
approach to drugs, those pillars being education, treatment,
enforcement and harm reduction.

Regular readers will know what I think of pretend "needle exchange"
programs where dirty needles are thrown on the street, or unsafe
"safe injection sites" where dirty street junk is injected with
nursing supervision. The whole thing in Vancouver looks like a
government agency set up to work in conjunction with the heroin and
cocaine dealers who control the street outside.

The prescription heroin trial that's currently going on in Vancouver
offers more potential, at least for a few hardcore addicts who don't
respond to methadone treatment. This type of program is the closest
this country is going to get to legalization in the near future and
it can be done without the national and international political
backlash that would kill a bolder program.