MANY CASUALTIES, FEW VICTORIES, IN WAR ON DRUGS

THERE'S PROZAC FOR depression and Procepia for baldness and Lipitor to make
you thin and Viagra to make you potent and an orgasm pill due out soon.
There are all kinds of pills to tranquillize us, to put us to sleep, to
remove our headaches. And of course there's The Pill which transformed the
relationship between the sexes.

Drugs have become integral to our lifestyle, our pleasure, our very
existence. So why are we waging a war against drugs?

More precisely, why, when so many of us are now dependent upon a
pharmacopeia of mood-altering and physiology-altering drugs as no other
generation has been or ever imagined might one day be possible - except for
Aldous Huxley's prophetic 1932 novel Brave New World - are we waging an
all-out war against certain drugs that some among us, quite a small
minority, happen to depend upon?

These are the illicit drugs - crack, cocaine, heroin, hash, marijuana. Most
of them, but not giggly old pot, do terrible things to those who smoke them
or ingest them or inject them. But these individuals are as dependent upon
them as so many of the rest of us are upon on Prozac and Procepia and
Viagra and the rest.

So why are we waging wars against their drugs? At least as relevant, why
are we waging this war when we so obviously are losing it?

The war was first declared by Richard Nixon, which ought to make everyone
pause. It was escalated by Nancy Reagan, which ought to make everyone take
a long timeout. But whether its original authors were well-intentioned or
merely looking for some politically safe cause, the single certainty about
the war they began, and that almost everyone has been pursuing since as if
it were a holy crusade, is that it's going very, very, badly.

The most telling statistics are those from the U.S. where the war is being
waged most fiercely. In 1980, total spending on drug control in the U.S.
was $4 billion. Today, the figure is $32 billion, or eight times as much.
Between 1980 and today, the number of people in American prisons on drug
charges has increased from 50,000 to 400,000, also an eight-fold increase.

While the war has achieved few victories, it has created some victors. All
the attempts to wipe out the drugs have given them an immense scarcity
value. By one United Nations estimate, the drug industry generates revenues
of some $400 billion (U.S.), or close to one-tenth
of global trade in all products. The result is massive money laundering and
global criminal networks, as well as escalating crime by the addicts
themselves.

This week, at a conference in New York, U.N. member-states reviewed the
state of the campaign. On behalf of the U.S., Bill Clinton called for a
program of total global elimination by the year 2008.

No, said most of the producer states (such as Mexico). The U.S. provided
the principal market for the product. Only if the U.S. provided funds for
alternative agricultural development (hard to do because growing the coca
leaf is so profitable) would they agree to a U.N.-run global program.

More creative was the "No, but" reply. This came from a number of
non-governmental organizations, led by the New York-based Lindesmith Centre
that's funded by financier George Soros. In a full-page newspaper ad
cosigned by an extraordinary number of luminaries from, on the right,
economist Milton Friedman to, on the left, Body Shop's Anita Roddick, the
Lindesmith Centre declared that "The war on drugs is doing more harm to our
society than drug abuse itself."

The Lindesmith Centre proposed no specific alternatives. But two
well-established ones exist. One is to decriminalize soft drugs like
marijuana. In Holland, licensed cannabis houses offer customers the
alternatives of smoking the weed or of eating it in the form of cakes.
Spain, Italy and Germany have all decriminalized marijuana.

The other alternative, pioneered in Liverpool and in Amsterdam, is what's
known as Harm Reduction. This involves, besides education programs, needle
exchanges (the use of unclean needles by addicts is a major cause of the
spread of AIDS) and providing addicts with methadone which has many of the
same properties as heroin and morphine. Here, this kind of program is
advocated by the Toronto-based Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy.

No more than alcohol by Prohibition can the use of drugs be extinguished.
Unless human nature itself can be extinguished. What can be done is to make
the use of drugs cleaner and safer and cheaper and, therefore, less
criminal.

Richard Gwyn usually writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. His Internet
address is gwyn@inforamp.net -- Dave Haans Graduate Student,
University of Toronto WWW: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca:8080/~haans/