TARGET 'VICTIMS' TO SOLVE THE DRUG PROBLEM

Earlier this week, police announced the largest heroin bust in Canadian
history. In two separate raids, one in Toronto and one in Vancouver,
they intercepted 156 kilos of heroin worth almost $150-million on the
street. I hope it does not traduce the courage and hard work of the
police to wonder: What exactly have they accomplished?

Daniel Moynihan, a U.S. Senator, likes to tell the following story
about his experience commanding Richard Nixon's war on drugs.

In August, 1969, he negotiated a complicated deal whereby India, Turkey
and France all pledged for the first time to co-operate in stamping out
poppy growing and heroin manufacture. "Shortly after my return I found
myself in a helicopter with George P. Shultz heading from Camp David. I
told him of my triumph.

He looked up from his papers and nodded.

No, I came back, this is really BIG. Same response.

More than a little deflated, I pondered for a moment, and then
suggested that what he was thinking was that as long as there is a
demand there will be a supply. Whereupon that great statesman and
sometime professor of economics at the University of Chicago looked up
from his papers, smiled, and said, 'You know, there is hope for you
yet.' "

Here's what Shultz was driving at. The U.S. government estimates that
the poppy fields already in cultivation produce enough opium paste to
manufacture some 410 metric tons of heroin a year -- or more than
37,000 kilos.

World heroin consumption is estimated at a little less than half that
amount.

In other words, the world's police forces would have to make more than
three 156-kilo busts a day, every single day, with no time off for
Sundays simply to blot up the world's excess heroin production.

But of course busts on such a scale are unusual and difficult
achievements. The biggest single heroin bust in recent years was scored
by the Turks in 1998: It netted 480 kilos, or less than five days'
worth of heroin production. And if such interceptions ever become more
common, the world's heroin producers can easily increase their
production. Heroin is an agricultural commodity and as any farmer can
tell you, the normal condition of agricultural markets is glut.

The surest sign that interdiction is failing to crimp supply is the
steady decline in the real price of drugs.

Retired general Barry McCaffrey, President Clinton's drug czar, told
Congress last year that the average price of a gram of heroin on the
street tumbled by nearly half between 1981 and 1998, from US$3,115 to
US$1,800. And while that 1981 gram was typically only 19% pure, the
1998 gram was 25% pure. Despite the 20-year war on drugs, supply is
pulling farther and farther ahead of demand.

And demand, after a welcome decline in the early 1990s, has once again
begun to rise.

Proponents of the drug-interdiction strategy often argue that minus
police efforts to intercept drugs heading our way, the North American
drug problem would be even worse than it is. Myself, I doubt that, and
sometimes wonder whether drug-interception may not actually be
aggravating the problem.

The premise behind drug interdiction is this: Drug abuse is something
that happens because foreigners are thrusting drugs upon us -- er,
sorry, "our children." The pushers are the villains, "our children" are
the victims.

As victims, "our children" require help and protection. We offer them
drug treatment programs to recover from the addiction into which they
have been led, but we also try to smooth their way back into society --
by, for example, defining drug addiction as a disability against which
employers and landlords may not discriminate.

But there's another way of looking at this story.

Maybe the foreigners aren't such villains and "our children" aren't
such victims.

As dreadful as the harm done to us by drugs may be, the harm done to
countries like Colombia and Mexico is far worse.

North American drug users have thrust hundreds of billions of dollars
into the hands of the most evil and violent people in those countries,
and they have used that wealth to create vast criminal kingdoms that
corrupt justice and overwhelm lawful authority.

From the point of view of people in those countries, the drug problem
is as much one of our money invading them as of their drugs invading
us.

Our money will continue to invade them so long as our people continue
to use drugs on the scale they do. Drugs will cease to be a problem
only when our people cease to buy them.

How can we persuade them to do that? Locking them up is, of course, one
possibility. But something like 15 million North Americans use illicit
drugs in the course of a year. Only a police state could arrest them
all -- and with a year in jail costing upwards of $25,000 not even a
police state could afford to. We could, as the Americans do, arrest the
more flagrant users; people caught with unusually large amounts of
drugs or people who sell drugs to other users.

But that policy gives the green light to the vast majority who use
drugs only occasionally.

What, however, if we jettisoned the idea of drug user as victim
altogether? What if we treated him as a rational person capable of
making a choice -- and encouraged him to understand the frightening
(but non-criminal) consequences of his choice?

We would then experiment with measures like these: denying drug
addiction its status as a disability, freeing landlords to evict drug-
users and employers to fire them; testing public employees for drug use
and firing them if they fail; testing recipients of welfare and Indian
Affairs money for drug use and cutting them off if they fail.

Here's one final thought, the most radical of all: Instead of the
government trying to lure drug users into free treatment programs,
perhaps it ought to consider offering such programs only to those
willing to pay for them, either in cash or with labour.

The point would be to send potential users a message: If you get
yourself addicted, it is going to be your problem.

Be warned.

For until our people take the warning, our police can stack the kilos
of heroin five yards high at their triumphant press conferences -- the
drug problem will get no better.