WAGING WAR ON DRUGS DOES NOT PAY

AN UNDERCOVER COP miraculously survives a close quarters shooting in
Toronto and the emphasis - understandably - was on the bad guy who pulled
the trigger.

Get him. He shot a cop.

But notwithstanding the profession of the victim, a police officer, this
was just another bang-bang night in the big city.

A drug deal had gone bad. A sting had stung. The outcome - blood on the
ground - was all too familiar.

Drugs propel crime. Whether on an international scale, with cocaine
kingpins from South America, or in the local microcosm of territorial
management, the result is always violence and a repugnant disrespect for
life.

In Toronto, murder and mayhem evolve from domestic disputes, twisted
passions, the occasional business disagreement and young men dissin' each
other. But, over and above all else, it's the drugs: production,
distribution, and the terrible hunger for a high.

Any honest cop will tell you the same thing: This is not a war we can win
by law enforcement.

Despite the billions of dollars thrown at policing drugs in North America,
despite the lucrative recovery industry drug addiction has created, despite
all the lives lost, there has not been a significant dent in stopping the
flow of drugs and the flow of blood.

We really can't expect the police to openly declare what must be said - not
when their own jobs would be put at risk. And we can't expect politicians
to make the bold moves required. And we can't expect the ``care-givers'' -
the detox agencies and clinics - to befriend the enemy.

But there is only one answer: Decriminalizing drugs. All of them.

Not just cannabis, which is heading in that direction, despite recent
efforts by the World Health Organization to squelch the results of their
own study that showed cannabis is less harmful than alcohol or tobacco.
(This, the same increasingly politicized WHO that all but quashed the
results of a long-anticipated seven-year study, which it had commissioned,
that showed absolutely no link between lung cancer and second-hand smoke.)

Politically speaking, these dual findings were not in synch with the moral
tone of Western countries, especially the U.S., where zero tolerance on
drugs has created draconian third-strike laws.

Drugs, in all their insidious forms, should be decriminalized so that we
finally might have a chance to beat them back.

Remove the criminality and what you have left is a major health problem.
But we can deal with health issues without getting hysterical. All that
money saved from law enforcement can be directed toward health promotion
and treatment. And if those same drugs were available legally on the
streets, surely we would at least cut down on the gunmen and the gunplay
and the innocent victims and the clumsy robberies which occur simply to
support those drug habits.

It's taken us a hundred years of inappropriate treatment to realize that
perhaps depression is physiological in nature for many people, and that new
anti-depressants can almost immediately accomplish what therapy could not.

Is there any chance that such a drug can be developed for those people who
are predisposed to drug addiction? Do we want to put research dollars into
this?

That's not so outrageous, really. It's a question that was posited in a
recent issue of The New Yorker, which looked at the high cost (and
profitability) of private drug treatment facilities.

Would it not make more sense to siphon off money for research into a
quasi-Prozac pill for drug addicts, just as there are anti-psychotic drugs
for schizophrenics?

A drug that cures the urge for drugs.

Just imagine.