ILLEGAL-DRUG FIGHT IS COSTLY AND INEFFECTIVE

The need to decriminalize Canada's costly and ineffective campaign against
illegal drugs is one of the few areas of social policy where you find
everybody from soft-hearted social activists to free-market capitalists
sharing the same arguments, and many of the same solutions.

The reason isn't hard to find: Canada's policy of tolerating drugs like
alcohol and nicotine while imposing draconian penalties on those who
possess other drugs is so obviously counterproductive, so costly and so
offensive to a liberal democracy's concept of civil liberties that it is a
monument to the power of myth over rational thought. What's more, it's
darned expensive.

Perhaps the most complete estimate of the cost to Canada's economy of
illegal drugs comes from Eric Single, a professor of public health at the
University of Toronto.

At a recent conference on Canada's urban drug problem, Single estimated
that as of 1992, it cost about $400 million a year to enforce drug laws,
including policing, court costs and prison costs. Add in another $823
million in lost economic productivity resulting from illness and premature
death of illegal drug users, $88 million for health care and smaller
amounts for research, prevention and other related activities and the total
cost to the economy each year is $1.4 billion.

Now it's true that taken alone, these figures don't add up to an indictment
of Canada's prohibitionist approach to drugs. After all, it might be said
that without the current drug laws, there would be still more drug use and
the cost to society would be still higher.

One might even find some support for this position by looking at the tragic
balance sheet of Canada's most popular legal drugs, alcohol and tobacco,
which together cost the country an estimated $18.4 billion each year,
mostly for illness, premature death and law-enforcement.

But isn't it strange, then, that nobody is calling for alcohol and tobacco
to be prohibited. This experiment has already been tried with alcohol in
the U.S. and proved to be a terrible failure, turning otherwise law-abiding
citizens into criminals and spawning widespread violence and contempt for
the law.

That's why most countries settle for a policy of regulating alcohol and
tobacco, educating youths about their dangers and cracking down hard on
drug users who might harm others (such as those who drink and drive.) This
approach might not be ideal, but it seems to minimize the hurtful impact of
drug use better than prohibition, which not only converts recreational drug
users into felons but seems to be remarkably ineffective at discouraging
consumption.

Political scientist Patrick Basham of the Fraser Institute, who organized
the conference on Canada's drug problem, notes that despite today's harsh
penalties for illegal drug use, annual spending on such drugs is estimated
by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to be nearly $10 billion. That figure
is rising, Basham says, and the impact of drug use is widespread, with 3
million Canadian families estimated to have at least one member who uses
illegal drugs.

So what is to be done? Probably the most important step our politicians
need to take is to understand that it is hypocritical and counterproductive
to legislate morality. It may be that drug users are fools, and maybe
they're immoral, but as long as it is legal to drink and smoke yourself to
death, it makes no sense to imprison some of our immoral fools and not
others. It does make sense, however, to reduce the harm done by drug users
to society and to themselves. That's what we already do with legal drugs,
and that's the approach that some countries, including the Netherlands and
Switzerland, are trying out on illegal drugs.

Such an approach doesn't legalize drugs, but shifts the focus of drug
policy - at least as far as users are concerned - from punishment to
control.

Ueli Minder, an official in Switzerland's federal office of public health,
told the Fraser Institute conference that Swiss authorities supplement
their educational and law-enforcement efforts by providing about 14,000
drug addicts with methadone, a synthetic narcotic, and another 800 with
controlled quantities of pure heroin.

Clearly, this policy hasn't ended drug addiction, but it doesn't seem to
have worsened the problem either. Drug use among youths has stopped
increasing in Switzerland.

Meanwhile, the sickness and crime related to addiction is down. Deaths
related to drug use plunged to 241 last year from 419 five years earlier,
while both AIDS and hepatitis infections are "noticeably reduced."

Better still, even the hard-core addicts receiving heroin therapy have done
well: homelessness has fallen to one per cent from 12 per cent,
unemployment was cut to 20 per cent from 44 per cent and about one-fifth
have dropped heroin entirely to go on a less-drastic form of treatment.

Really, the only difficulty with such a policy is that it requires some
humility from politicians, which might mean that it will be a long time
before its obvious logic is accepted in Canada.