WHAT WILL IT BE: LEGALIZATION, ALL-OUT WAR OR STATUS QUO?

The 'Four Pillars'

Free wine too?

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.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is reputed to be a libertarian at
heart, but his justice and public safety posse, Vic Teows and
Stockwell 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 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
Lotus Land 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 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.

Vancouver's drug-policy co-ordinator 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.