HEROIN WAR A TERRIBLE FAILURE

Good news. The police have grabbed another couple of big loads of heroin,
inconveniencing some criminals - and making it more likely that your home
will be broken into.

That's not the headline. But ultimately, it's the only real effect of last
week's big heroin seizures in Toronto and Vancouver.

Addicts aren't going to quit because police seized heroin hidden in phoney
duck eggs. The dealers are going to keep dealing, users will keep using,
and a chunk of them will keep doing crime or selling their bodies to pay
for their habits.

It looked great, police in Toronto posing with the duck eggs that the
smugglers had used to hide heroin coming in from China. About 1,700 of the
174,000 duck eggs were plastic, and filled with 57 kilograms of heroin. In
Vancouver, police seized almost 100 kilograms of heroin concealed in a
container.

It was a big haul and police deserve congratulations for grabbing the drugs
and arresting 10 people. They're doing the job we asked them to take on.

But what's the real effect? Here in Victoria the head of the strike force
aimed at drugs and property crimes had a warning.

"You could expect to see more property crimes taking place, more thefts,
maybe even more robberies," he said. "A lot of times we find that people
who do robberies are either high on drugs or are looking for money to buy
more drugs."

Seizing heroin doesn't end addiction. It doesn't even stop the supply,
just slows it down enough that users have a harder time finding drugs and
prices go up for a while.

That also means people may die. Whenever supply is interrupted, users end
up trying to find new sources. Sometimes other drugs are substituted for
heroin; sometimes the new supply is of higher purity. The result can be
instant death. More than 200 people have already died of drug overdoses in
B.C.this year, in communities across the province. Young, old, men, women,
all gone. More adults lost to drugs than to car crashes.

And it's not just an urban problem, something for people on the grimy
streets of Vancouver's East Side. Here in the Kelowna area almost 50 died
of drug overdoses between 1993 and 1998. Through the Okanagan, more than 250.

More deaths, more crime, a few people in jail, the same number of addicts.
It doesn't sound like any sort of victory. After 40 years of using the
same tactics in the war on drugs, without any success, isn't it time for a
change?

I'm not saying we should abandon the war against drug smugglers. But it's
a waste of our energy, money and thousands of lives to ignore the immediate
opportunities to come up with a sensible policy that will solve many of the
real problems associated with drug use.

What's sensible? Two years ago the province's former chief medical health
officer offered his prescription. Create a substance abuse commission to
replace the fractured efforts now in place. Increase detox spaces by 50
per cent. Expand methadone treatment and make it free, since current costs
of more than $500 a month deter people from entering the program.

And, bravely, he proposed a test of legal heroin for those who qualify. A
similar experiment in Switzerland conducted on 1,100 addicts found no
overdose deaths, a massive reduction in criminal activity by the addicts,
and an increase in employment. More than 80 people even quit drugs during
the trial.

Controversial, certainly. But shouldn't it be more controversial that we
continue stupidly to follow a drug policy that has proven, over decades, to
be ineffective?

Let's make a commitment. For every dollar we spend on enforcement, we'll
spend five on harm reduction. We'll work to provide education, not only so
people don't start but so they act safely if they do begin using drugs.
(AIDS, HIV and other infectious diseases are widespread in intravenous drug
users.) We'll provide methadone, legal heroin and safe places to inject.
We'll treat this as a medical problem instead of a criminal one.

It sound spectacular, a seizure of millions of dollars worth of heroin. But
it does nothing to reduce the damage done in our communities by drugs. It
doesn't stop someone from that first experiment with heroin; it doesn't
help anyone quit; it doesn't reduce crime, or the terrible loss of life.

The old way hasn't worked. It's time for change.