Prime Minister:

Canada's current drug strategy is bankrupt. Anyone familiar with
history would have recognized that drug prohibition could not work for
the same reasons -- and with the same deleterious consequences -- as
prohibition of alcohol. After nearly 25 years of a "war on drugs" we
have more drugs, not less; we have drugs of greater purity and many
more sources of supply than we had only 10 years ago. Furthermore we
now have an epidemic of HIV infection in our major cities that is a
direct consequence of prohibitionist social engineering.

Police crackdowns simply multiply sources of supply and only
temporarily drive up costs. Drug prohibition, just like alcohol
prohibition, has fueled a powerful underground economy presided over
by some of the most violent-prone individuals in our society whose
enormous profits -- guaranteed by prohibition -- are directly
subsidized by taxpayers. Yet even the most dramatic evidence of
failure (more drugs, better quality) only encourages prohibitionists
to demand more police, more draconian laws, more non-violent people in
jail. From the standpoint of prohibition, nothing succeeds like failure.

Only Canada and the US have refused to apply a calm cost-benefit
analysis to their drug policies. Europe, Australia and New Zealand are
slowly awakening from this nightmare -- albeit in the teeth of US
resistance. Canada can lead the US, which is deeply implicated in the
prohibitionist death-grip, out of irrationality and into sanity and
humane public policy.

Here's my proposal for your "first hundred days" regarding the
so-called "war on drugs":

Phase 1: Win a general election, of course, preferably with a sizable
majority.

Phase 2: Visit the US president as soon as politically possible --
make no mention (or as little as possible or only in the strictest
confidence if you have his trust) of the so-called "war on drugs". The
US is also looking for a way to de-escalate but is stymied by the
entrenched interests of prohibition, on the right, and the
stranglehold of drugs-mythology in the public generally. US leaders
know that their drug policy is in the same dead-end situation, but are
terrified -- having painted themselves into a corner -- of now
appearing to be soft on drugs and crime. Currently there is no escape
but more of the same, irrespective of the demonstrated failure of the
last 25 years to either stem the tide of drugs coming into the country
or reduce demand within their population.

Phase 3: Announce in your first Speech from the Throne that you are
declaring victory in the war on drugs, and will immediately implement
federally-funded medicalization and harm reduction strategies -- as
experts on social and drug policy around the world have been
advocating for years. Don't leave it to the provinces because they are
weak-willed and too easily captured by ultra-conservative interests.
Withdraw from international treaties that restrict your freedom of
action in this regard -- do not be bullied into passivity by US
congressional pressure that Canada persist in a futile strategy. Use
the advantage of surprise to catch your opponents flat-footed. Then
move quickly to implement.

Phase 4: You have now captured the high ground, both morally and from
the standpoint of rational public policy. The opposition (domestic but
particularly US) will be ferocious -- all the more important that it
be done early so that you can reap the rewards (lower crime, reduced
influence of criminal gangs, arrested rate of spread of HIV) before
your first mandate expires. It is quite possible that were Canada not
so geographically close to the US we might have made some fundamental
changes years ago, as LeDain and others urged and as Australia and New
Zealand are currently doing. The time is now. One must not make bold
changes in public policy in a half-hearted manner but with great and
imaginitive leaps across political divides. This means coming clean
with the Canadian people.

Great leaders are seldom recognized for what they do in their time but
because of what they set in motion. Only the US and Canada among the
industrialized economies are still entrapped in the prohibitionist
black hole that affords no solution but more prisons, more cops and
more social damage and continued ignorance of the real issues. Our
European allies and trading partners are extracting themselves from
unworkable policies, having finally taken account of the enormous
unintended consequences of a policy that did not and could not work.

Prohibition is futile and counterproductive and no one even knows how
wasteful and destructive because many of the costs are hidden,
particularly in the loss to social productivity of people with
criminal records who may have been non-violent offenders when they
were first incarcerated.

Holland and Switzerland are leading the world on drug policy. There is
a lot of information that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
(and the RCMP too) would probably you rather not know about the
success of their programs for the health of drug users, the slowed
rate of HIV infection, and the drop in user-related crime, the ability
of ordinary people to hold jobs and be productive members of their
communities while maintaining their heroin addiction. They have proven
that, compared to drug prohibition, drug use itself is a small and
comparably manageable social problem once pragmatic considerations
displace black and white moral declarations. Prohibition gives
incentives to all the wrong political actors and cannot deliver under
any circumstances short of totalitarian rule.

The strategy demands a leader with vision and conviction: the short
term rewards will be small, the long term rewards will only
materialize if this strategy is accompanied by a vigorous education
campaign. Your predecessors have invested a lot of political capital
in the mythology of drugs and drug use -- so you will have a lot of
damage to undo. But you have powerful allies too, in places like the
Addiction Research Foundation and in the experience of other countries
where pragmatic approaches to the drug problem were from the outset
preferred over hysteria.

If, after three or four years, you are not rewarded with a dramatic
drop in drug-related crime, a more tolerant (because informed) public
opinion about the drugs-crime nexus, fewer young people being
destroyed by a criminal justice system that is compelled to do what it
knows is wrong and counteproductive, you can always reverse yourself
and return to the status quo ante.

I see very little likelihood of your having to reverse
course.

You can put Canada on the international map. You can give the United
States a face-saving way to wind down their own insane drug strategy
and you can reverse 80-odd years of bad, racist and counter-productive
public policy.

It is not risk free: The opposition from the usual quarters will be
ferocious. But it is the right thing to do.

I hope that you're enough of a visionary to consider some version of
this strategy. I, and many other reformers and progressives, could
vote for such a leader.

Sincerely, Craig Jones