WAR ON DRUGS A BUST, CANADA SAYS:

Criminalization Created Demand for Crack, Strengthened Drug Barons, Author
Argues

Far from cleaning up the streets, the war on drugs is responsible for the
rise of highly addictive, low-priced street drugs such as crack cocaine.

That is the startling conclusion of Drug Crazy, a new book by Mike Gray.

Mr. Gray, who also wrote the screenplay for The China Syndrome, asserts the
war on drugs has done little more than create a vibrant black market for
narcotics -- much the way the ill-fated prohibition of alcohol in the 1920s
and '30s sparked the rise of a massive moonshine industry.

Ruled by the law of supply and demand, Mr. Gray writes, modern drug barons
know only the cheapest, most potent products will win market share. That has
resulted in a Darwinian evolution in the strength of common street drugs:
the potency of heroin and marijuana has shot up, while their asking price
has plummeted.

Perhaps the most tragic consequence of this has been the rise of crack, a
cheap, addictive derivative of cocaine that provides an explosive but brief
high.

``Crack is the creation of the black market,'' writes Mr. Gray. ``The only
reason for its existence is economic. It's cheap (and) low cost makes it
available to the blue-collar market.''

If Mr. Gray is right, things will get worse before they get better.

His controversial take on the prohibition of narcotics comes as 150
countries are signing on to a renewed, UN-sponsored anti-drug campaign with
a multibillion-dollar budget.

In the U.S., President Bill Clinton has announced that next year's federal
budget will include a record $17 billion to get drugs off the streets --
even more than the huge sums spent by his predecessor, Ronald Reagan, who
was largely responsible for starting the war on drugs in the 1980s.

As the war on drugs escalates, so does opposition to it. A petition asking
the UN to work towards liberalizing drug laws is garnering high-profile
signatories, including Nobel laureate Adolfo Perez Esquivel, economist
Milton Friedman and NDP Leader Alexa McDonough.

Mr. Gray -- himself a signatory to the petition -- has won praise for his
book from influential sources. Dr. Joycelyn Elders, the former U.S. surgeon
general, and Elliott Richardson, the former U.S. attorney general, both
write glowing dust-jacket blurbs for Drug Crazy that argue the war on drugs
should not be sacrosanct.

``The burden of proof,'' writes Mr. Richardson, is shifting ``from the
critics of existing policy to its defenders.''

Mr. Gray's solution to the problem of the street-drug trade also offers an
unusual twist. Government must not only enter the drug trade, Mr. Gray
writes, it must sell drugs at prices that undercut those of the wares sold
by the black-market drug lords.

``If that means drugs have to be given away to serious addicts, so be it,''
Mr. Gray writes.

``A tightly controlled legal market, offering clean, unadulterated
pharmaceuticals, would instantly terminate the cash flow to the street
bazaar, and the river of money that has fuelled the most brutal collection
of criminal combines in the history of the planet would dry up ...''

The book begins with a graphic account of a drug bust in a Chicago
neighbourhood. As police close in on a suspect named De-De, the guns come
out, and bullets spray everywhere, wounding several officers. The tally for
a day's work in drug enforcement is modest: a dozen illegal weapons, about
31/2 kilograms of cocaine, $53,000 in cash and the destruction of a local
crack ring.

If the war on drugs had never been declared, Mr. Gray argues, perhaps the
crack would never have been there in the first place.

Checked-by: "R. Lake"