STOP FABRICATING WAR

Police forces should be the loudest cheerleaders of the very real prospect
of marijuana decriminalization.

For this latest instalment on their futile war on dope, we'll first refer
to the RCMP Criminal Intelligence Directorate Report on illegal drugs in
Canada for 1999.

The Mounties estimate the wholesale marketing of illicit drugs has reached
$4 billion a year -- increasing to $18 billion at street level. That
actually sounds mighty conservative but it nonetheless illustrates the
counterproductive power of prohibition.

Those in scarlet estimate the amount of marijuana grown domestically to be
800,000 kg.

Less than half that amount, but a still significant quantity, is imported
into the country.

Yet police forces across the land seized only 24,000 kg of the weed in 1999
at the cost of untold millions of dollars in law enforcement expenditures.

It's mostly a make-work project.

In the report's synopsis, the RCMP author states: "For all drug types,
supply and demand have remained stable but will likely increase in the near
future."

Hardly stirring acclaim for the drug war.

Another tidbit leaps from the Mounties' pages that seems to give the lie to
some of the constant propaganda on the evils of marijuana.

We're constantly bombarded with the "fact" marijuana potency has
skyrocketed in recent years, yet the report states "the average THC content
of all samples analysed since 1995 is about 6%."

That 6% sounds oddly similar to the THC rates of decades ago. How could it be?

Meanwhile, as Canada's rate of crime in most categories has consistently
fallen, there's a glaring exception: drug offences have risen 33% since
1993 -- due mostly to marijuana offenders.

This continuing obsession with controlling what the populace ingests has
resulted in more imprisonment and a clogged court system.

Ottawa's 1998 national narcotics policy promised to move the battle against
drug use away from law enforcement and into the realm of health, education
and harm reduction. Clearly, the country has instead chosen to stick to the
same discredited path.

In B.C., Ottawa has shovelled millions of dollars into private law firms to
prosecute marijuana growers.

The writing's on the wall -- government prosecutors themselves can't keep
up with the cultivation activity because prohibition has made the practice
so lucrative.

Better they decriminalize marijuana and save our money they so eagerly pour
down a black hole.

One explanation for the reluctance to reform is Canada's desire to keep in
line with American justice -- a system hardly worth emulating.

In the U.S., nearly one in four inmates are incarcerated for drug offences
- -- a prison population of 458,000 that nearly equals the total number
behind bars in 1980.

That's an 11-fold increase in the drug offender prison population since
1980, while the number of violent criminals behind bars had merely doubled.

As for the deterrent factor, the states with higher drug offender
incarceration rates still have the greater levels of drug use.

In response, Michigan Democratic congressman John Conyers has called for
treatment in place of incarceration for non-violent drug users.

"The casualties from this nation's drug war have continued to mount with no
end in sight," concluded Conyers.

Canadians gazing south can't afford to be smug, particularly with cases
such as Grant Krieger's.

A judicial system straitjacketed by irrational laws actually incarcerated
the Calgary multiple sclerosis sufferer for allegedly distributing
medicinal marijuana.

Krieger walked into jail without his cannabis medicine and left it in a
wheelchair.

And we can now all sleep better at night?

That it takes the courts -- in this case the Ontario Court of Appeal -- to
nudge our lawmakers into doing what's right speaks volumes yet again of the
blinkered inertia infecting our politicians.