WHY ARE WE THE CASUALTIES IN THE WAR ON DRUGS?

Derek Ogden is 47, and young-looking for his rank. He has a cop's
close-cropped hair and gym-kept physique. His title is a mouthful:

RCMP Chief Superintendent, Director General, Drugs and Organized
Crime, Federal and International Operations. Ogden is a general in
the war against drugs.

He is, as such, a soldier, not a policy maker.

But what he thinks, matters.

And what he thought of Vancouver Mayor Sam Sullivan's suggestion to
dispense drugs to addicts as a form of crime control was not much.

He saw it as surrender.

"When I look at harm reduction and the Canada drug strategy, it has
been built on four pillars -- it was built on prevention and
education, on treatment, on enforcement and then on harm reduction.
And when I look at the way harm reduction is going now, I see that
harm reduction in some circles is becoming very synonymous with
facilitation. And I think that facilitation isn't something that we
want to build a firm Canada drug policy on."

And why?

"To me, it's almost like we're abdicating our responsibility, and
that concerns me.

"I think if at the end of the day that society turns around and says,
'Okay, we accept that you're always going to have a drug abuse
problem, and away you go,' then I think we're just giving up on them."

An admirably moral sentiment. We must not "facilitate" the
dispensation of drugs to addicts because it is our societal duty to
help them. We must not "give up" on them because it reflects on our humanity.

But wait a minute, Ogden was cautioned.

Vancouver has the highest property crime rate in Canada. Despite
being the most tolerant constituency in the country, despite
trail-blazing decades of expensive social welfare programs to help
addicts, its citizens endure an epidemic of car thefts, home
break-ins, expensive insurance claims, prostitution, street begging,
homelessness, public obscenity, needles left in schoolyards,
gang-related violence, grow-ops and -- if you want to talk about
facilitation and morality -- an open and tolerated drug market down
the street from a police station.

So, it was suggested to Ogden, many, many people in this city long
ago exhausted their high moral sentiment about rescuing addicts from
their own worst impulses, and now only wish the police would stop the
junkie from smashing in their car window to get the 57 cents in
change they made the mistake of leaving in plain view on their dashboard.

But they know, from experience, that the police can do absolutely
nothing about it, if, indeed, they even bother to show up at their door.

So why not try a drug-dispensation program, Ogden was asked, in view
of the public's continued frustration? Why not consider forms of
legalization to do an end-around drug gangs?

Because, Ogden maintained, it would only make things worse.

"I think to [legalize drugs] would only invite more use .... I think
that sometimes people throw out that magic bullet of 'if it was
legalized, then we wouldn't have the problem.' But I think if it was
legalized we would have a much greater problem than we have today."

And does he have any proof of that, he was asked?

"It's hard to answer that question because we have never had a
situation where the drug laws have never been enforced anywhere ....
My assumption is the drug use would go up."

That is to say -- and I hope I am not being unfair to Ogden here --
the general running the nation's war against drugs and organized
crime is against legalization or drug-dispensation on the personal
belief that drug use would go up.

And how is that war going, he was asked?

"I guess that's the question that always comes up, and to me, it kind
of oversimplifies the situation because I think it's probably a lot
more complicated than that.

"I do think that we've seen that the groups we've targeted have
become more sophisticated over the years .... they're a lot more
international than they used to be in the past."

It was hard to judge how much effect they are having against such
groups, Ogden said, but police are having more success gathering
intelligence about drug gangs than before. They estimate that some
600 gangs are operating in all of Canada, Ogden said, with 128 of those in B.C.

In all, it was not a reassuring conversation. Again, I would not wish
to be unfair to Ogden, who, of course, does his job with nothing but
the best of intentions, but I translated it thusly:

We criminalize some drugs, but not others, on dubious moral grounds
because of assumptions it would be bad for society. We prosecute a
war against those who would profit off that criminalization without
knowing, really, if we are having any effect, or if, in fact, we're
exacerbating the problem by doing so.

It was almost as if there were two conversations going on, and we
weren't hearing each other. It was as if the forces Ogden represented
were speaking on a much higher plane, the one where governments
marshal huge forces against international drug cartels, where its
generals fight crusades against evil drug lords in a brave attempt to
protect society.

Meanwhile, way, way down on a much lower plane, at street level, in
folks' backyards, you hear:

"Damn, some junkie smashed my car window again!"

In war, they call that collateral damage -- which, whenever it
happens, always makes one wonder just who the war really hurts.