END THE WAR ON DRUGS

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.

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 eight per cent from 2001 to 2004.

The bad news, as I'm reminded by a new discussion paper just
released by the B.C. 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:

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

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

3. 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.
Stephen Harper is reputed to be a libertarian at heart, but his
justice and public safety posse, Vic Teows 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 street crime, the car and house break-ins that ordinary
people are all too familiar with, 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. currently 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.

Free Wine Too

Vancouver's drug policy coordinator recently suggested a program to
offer free daily rations of cheap red wine to hardcore alcoholics.

The idea of this program would be to target those who will otherwise
resort to drinking Lysol or shoe polish or whatever they can get,
with predictable consequences for them and our idealistic socialized
medical system that has to fix everyone, no matter what they choose
to do to themselves.

Personally, I could hold my nose and support such a plan, just like
the prescription heroin program.

If we're going to have a victim culture where bad choices are
treated as "diseases," with "society" and the "government" taking
the place of individual responsibility, the nanny state might as
well provide this welfare for the mind so working people can live in peace.