CANADIAN WARNS AGAINST `HYSTERIA' IN WAR ON DRUGS

Individual rights trampled: Economist

UNITED NATIONS - Amid more than 100 countries declaring war on drugs, a lone
Canadian has urged an end to anti-drug ``hysteria'' he says is trampling
individual rights.

Dozens of speakers at a U.N. conference billed as the first global drug
summit called for more laws, more enforcement, more spending and more
treaties to nab drug suspects across national borders.

But Montreal economist Thomas Naylor sounded a note of caution.

``This whole drug war hysteria is getting quite dangerous,'' said the McGill
University professor, one of four experts reporting to the summit on money
laundering by drug criminals. ``We're ramming through emergency
legislation'' that allows police and other authorities to ignore law and
justice, especially individual rights, he said in an interview.

``There are horrible cases (of rights abuses) in the (United) States, real
abominations.''

Seizure laws are ``turning police forces into looters, into self-financed
bounty hunters,'' because they allow police to keep seized property and
cash, he said.

Earlier, on the final day of the three-day summit, Naylor told U.N.
delegates that countries are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to
fight drug-related crime.

However, ``we don't know if the cost to society doesn't exceed the benefits
. . . we don't know if it's a serious problem or a tremendous crisis.''

And small nations simply can't afford the anti-drug measures urged on them
by powerful countries and tied to aid or trade, he said.

The report, co-written by Naylor and three American experts, names 48
countries as ``major havens'' for phony corporations and secret bank
accounts of drug traders.

It was immediately attacked by some Third World delegates as imposing
Western values and unreasonable demands on poor countries.

Naylor was the only report author to warn that current laws and proposed
measures may violate civil rights.

He cited a trend among some democracies to seize assets of suspects before
they're tried, and then forcing citizens to prove their innocence.

``It reverses the burden of proof,'' Naylor said in the interview.

``You can't seize their money and their property and trample their civil
rights and call them drug criminals without proving it. It's utterly
Orwellian.''

Naylor advised countries to use existing tax laws and financial
investigators to catch people hiding, moving and trying to clean ``dirty
money,'' rather than rely on inexpert police.

Canadian Solicitor-General Andy Scott, speaking to delegates last night,
acknowledged that Canada has become a drug exporter, thanks to a booming
marijuana business.

U.S. and Canadian officials believe marijuana now ranks as British
Columbia's most lucrative agricultural product, with illegal revenues
estimated at anywhere from $400 million to more than $3 billion a year.

Scott said Canada must do more to prevent young people from trying drugs,
boost treatment for addicts and stop the drug trade.

A new money-laundering law is to be introduced this fall and will be
followed by a ``national strategy on organized crime,'' Scott said.

Canadian officials released statistics estimating drug abuse costs each
Canadian about $48 a year - a total of $1.37 billion - for health care,
prevention and law enforcement, and lost productivity from illness and
premature death.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett