DONSANJH'S HARD-LINE DRUG IDEAS DON'T WORK

Any time is fed-bashing time in B.C., so here's hoping Attorney General
Ujjal Dosanjh was simply engaging in meaningless crowd pleasing with his
remarks this week about cracking down on the drug trade. What with several
decades of commission recommendations and studies urging various B.C.
governments to reconsider their hard nosed handling of our "drug problem
"throwing a few million policing dollars at it is the last thing we need.

But when the national media got wind of a rumour that the U.S. was poised
to blacklist Canada because we're too soft on the drug trade, Dosanjh
missed the real issue by a mile, falling back instead on a tired old
complaint about a lack of federal funding and Ottawa's refusal to make good
on its promise to help B.C. curb trafficking. As it turns out, the
blacklist rumour was nothing more than that - a trial balloon floated
briefly by a few crabby U.S. politicians in the spring and deflated soon
after by anxious diplomats. What's more worrying is the revelation that
Dosanjh may still think that fire-power is how we'll win this war.

Surely the continued rise in drug use, despite a century of political fist
pounding and police enforcement, should have convinced us that our battle
tactics don't work. People use drugs because they make a bad day better-
and until there are no more bad days, they're going to keep on using them.
And where there's a demand, there's always a supply. Stand on guard at any
border point with a hundred of Ottawa's finest, and the drugs are still
going to flow through.

That's not to say we shouldn't do something. HIV and hepatitis have reached
epidemic levels among B.C.'s injection drug users, and one person a day
dies from an overdose. Injected drugs are the leading cause of death for
B.C. adults ages 30-49. That's a whole lot of suffering, health dollars and
risk.

But until we get a grip on our misplaced morality around drug use, we're
going nowhere. We're still issuing blanket warnings to our kids that drugs
are bad and then imbibing the liquid ones with relish. We're still
cautioning them that the road to hell is paved with marijuana even when
they're surrounded by peer and parental evidence that it's hardly the
devil's weed.

And we're drafting our arbitrary list of "good" and "bad" drugs without
questioning why some users get our sympathy and others get our scorn. What
exactly is the difference between needing insulin injections because you
ate badly all your life and now have diabetes, and needing heroin
injections because you were a messed up teenage user and ended up with a
permanent opiate receptor in your brain?

B.C. medical health officer Dr. Perry Kendall, former president of the
Addiction Research Council, isn't counting on a quick attitudinal
turnaround. But like many of his predecessors, he argues that the least we
can do is reduce harm.

If he had his way, maintenance heroin would be available through
prescription. Those able to switch to methadone would no longer face
onerous user fees from the college of Physicians and Surgeons, which runs
B.C.'s program.

Cannabis would be decriminalised, and the subsequent crime fighting savings
put to better use.

People wanting to detox could find a spot at a treatment facility when they
needed it, not months later. Children would learn that not all drugs are
created equal, and would get the facts on each one of them rather than the
all - encompassing scare tactics that currently pass for drug education.

"We tend to give messages that are not backed up by what the kids see",
says Kendall. "We should be quite honest with the risks; when you match
alcohol against cannabis, its hard to see that alcohol is any less harmful,
given that it can lead to violence, lever damage, toxicity and death.

Former provincial medical health officer Dr. John Millar said many of the
same things in a report ignored by the government since its release more
than a year ago. And before him there was the Cain Commission and the
Ledain Commission, and a landmark 1956 study out of the University of B.C.
So bash Ottawa you must, Ujjal, but next make it about drug law reform.
Make a difference, not just political noise.