LOSING THE WAR ON DRUGS

A narcotics detective knows what's needed to win: money and lots of
it

It matters little which side of the debate you stand on. When it comes
to Edmonton's war on drugs, one thing is painfully obvious: something
has to change.

Spend one afternoon discussing the "war" with any of the Edmonton
Police Service's eight undercover cops and you'll quickly reach the
same conclusion.

We'll call my contact Dave, a veteran undercover narc whose office
looks down on the hooker stroll along one of the seedier sections of
downtown. I don't care how bad you think you are or how many times
you've confidently fingered someone in a bar to a friend as "a narc",
you wouldn't finger Dave. A bum, maybe, but not a cop.

Dave knows much of what there is to know about drugs in Edmonton:
who's selling it, who's buying it and where. How the drugs get there,
how they're made in the first place and by whom.

And he knows his job is, in the long run, pointless. What he does
makes no difference in the war on drugs.

It's not the first time a local narcotics officer has taken such a
stand - Sgt. Nick Bok said much the same in a Sun interview last year
- - but it reinforces that Edmonton's police, like their counterparts
across Canada, are flushing millions of dollars down the toilet every
year for the sake of tokenism.

We're there to discuss a different story, but halfway through the
interview, he gets up from his desk and puts his hands behind his
head, briefly and with a sense of frustration, as he stares out the
window.

"I could go out of this office and walk over to one of a couple of
locations not five minutes from here and bust three guys in the next
15 minutes," he says. "And there'd be three new ones there just as
quickly."

The underground world of narcotics is so far beyond police control,
said the officer, that they only specifically target wholesalers -
usually either folks with large hydroponic marijuana operations, those
importing coke and heroin, or those cooking speed in local labs.

Low-level street dealers, many of them users, are certainly no
priority. And users, despite the department's so-called "zero
tolerance" policy, don't qualify either.

He figures if you look at the war on drugs from a prevention
perspective, Edmonton's efforts are a joke. The officers could work
12-hour shifts for the next generation and still not make a dent. If
the city wants to genuinely fight drugs it will have to put the money
- - and he means millions and millions of dollars - behind it. On what
they're working with right now, he says, police are having "absolutely
no effect."

But he tries to not think about that. He tries to do his job as well
as he can. The alternative is to legalize drugs. But that won't take
away their power to hurt, he says, and "I can't see much sense in
making them more available."

He recognizes many members of the public disagree with his hard-line
stand. They want drugs treated as a health issue instead of a criminal
one - legalize or decriminalize, then treat the addicts. And, Dave
concedes, it's tough to justify spending $2 million a year fighting an
unwinnable war against an opponent who will always - always - have
thousands of times your resources.

"Then again, if they were to legalize drugs we'd all be out of jobs,"
he says jokingly.

Whether to continue the war is a political quagmire, a cause that no
politician, especially at the federal level, will even take a whiff
of. There are too many pitfalls, too many divergent opinions to make a
decision that pleases most, let alone all, of their constituents. So
they simply charge ahead as if tough talk on drugs is the same thing
as tough action.

Ultimately, it comes down to this: Either we're against them or we're
not. Either we give Dave the money he really needs or we don't. It's
no wonder he's frustrated.

Someone, surely, must take a stand that's more than merely symbolic.
But Dave won't be holding his breath waiting for that to happen.

Checked-by: Patrick Henry