CALL OFF THE WAR ON DRUGS

This week's United Nations summit on drug policy in New York is an
appropriate occasion to reflect on the global war on drugs and on Canada's
part in that war.

Every decade, the UN adopts new international drug-control conventions,
focused largely on criminalization and punishment, that prevent individual
nations from devising local solutions to local drug problems. Every year,
governments enact more punative and costly drug-control conventions and
politicians endorse harsher drug-war strategies.

The result? UN agencies estimate the annual revenue generated by the illegal
drug industry at $400-billion (U.S.), roughly the equivalent of 8 per cent
of total international trade. This industry has empowered organized
criminals, corrupted governments, eroded internal security, stimulated
violence and distorted economic markets. These are the consequences not of
drug use as such, but of decades of futile prohibitionist policies.

In Canada, prohibition has encouraged marketers to sell and users to use
more potent forms of drugs or more dangerous methods of ingestion. Users
have no guarantee of quality. As a result, some, especially the young and
inexperienced, die; others are maimed.

Our drug laws have turned thousands of otherwise law-abiding citizens into
criminals and thrown many of them into prison for their involvement with
drugs. Having sent them to jail, we deny them the means to prevent HIV
infection from massive levels of drug use in prison. Until recently we
refused to make condoms available to prisoners, in part for fear condoms
would be used to hide drugs; better to preserve the moral fibre of our
prisons than to protect peoples lives. Yet despite finally acknowledging
that drug use in prisons is widespread, we have largely refused to help
prisoners with needle exchanges or cleaning solutions to help prevent the
further transmission of the AIDS virus.

Canada's 1982 statement of principles, The Criminal Law in Canadian Society,
said criminal law should be used only to deal with conduct for which other
means of social control are inadequate or inappropriate. Nice words, but no
reflection of reality. Instead, the criminal law has become the instrument
of first resort in dealing with drugs. And still we have not stopped the
flow of drugs into Canada, any more than the United States -- the most
powerful nation on Earth, with some of the most repressive drug laws in the
world -- has stopped the flow into the U.S.

Endin prohibition makes common sense. Instead of propping up an enormously
profitable black market in drugs, and pushing drug users to the margins of
society, governments could focus on productive ways to control the harmful
use of substances, be they alcohol, tobacco, marijuana, heroin or cocaine.
They could turn away from soul-destroying prisons and toward understanding
drug use as a natural, not deviant, part of human behavior.

Too often those who call for open debate, rigorous analysis of current
policies and serious consideration of alternatives are accused of
"surrendering." But the true surrender is when fear and inertia combine to
shut off debate, suppress critical analysis and dismiss all alternatives to
current policies. Surely it is time to hold an open debate on global
drug-control policies.

Eugene Oscapella is a lawyer and Diane Riley is a policy analyst. Both work
with the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy, a non-profit organization
founded in 1993 to seek humane and effective drug policies and a reduction
in harm related drug use.

Checked-by: Melodi Cornett