When will it finally be time to talk about drug policy to talk openly and
honestly about this this cancer in our society? In Vancouver, with our
accession to the title of the world leader in the incidence of HIV among
injectiondrug users and the declaration of a "health emergency" by the
Vancouver/Richmond Health Board, surely the time is now.

Politicians are rightly terrified of this topic, because it is a very
emotional one. As Eric Schlosser said in the April issue of Atlantic
Monthly, speaking of the mildest drug, "marijuana gives rise to insanity
not in its users but in the policies directed against it." Our reactions
tend to be kneejerk. We can afford this no longer.

Precisely because the debate (which inevitably leads to consideration of
decriminalizing drugs) is bound to be long, hard, emotional, the reasons for
holding it now need to be pretty good. They are. Examine four kinds of
costs: health dollars, crime and policing dollars, human misery, and respect
for our justice system.

Consider only heroin/cocaine injectors, and look at just the downtown east
side of Vancouver, with a population of perhaps 6,000 users. (There are
higher estimates). Some medical sources say 3,000 of these will be
HIVpositive, as a result of dirty needles and other means of transmission.
Assume that 10 per cent die each year an a new 10 per cent become
HIVpositive, and that the lifetime treatment cost to society per person is
$150,000. That adds $45million to our publichealth commitments every year.

Consider the cost of property crimes and policing. No one knows the
magnitude, but street workers say that of the four main sources of drug
finance theft, prostitution, dealing (to outsiders) and welfare theft
is at the top. The 1994 report of British Columbia's chief coroner, Vince
Cain, quoted a police view that 60 per cent of nondrug crime in the
province is motivated by drug use. Think about that number.

The human misery? It comes in so many ways. John Lowman of Simon Fraser
university is a national expert on prostitution. In receiving the Sterling
Prize in Support of Controversy last month, Prof. Lowman was asked why the
estimated 1,500 to 2,000 street sex workers in Vancouver (with an offstreet
cohort thought to be 10 times larger) chose this very tough life.
"Criminalization of drugs is one of the basic driving forces of the sex
trade," was his reply. "Drug policy is the greatest social mistake of our
time."

The misery in Vancouver's downtown east side is focused on four groups: the
homeless, women (through the sex trade), the mentally ill and aboriginals.
Aboriginals constituted 17 per cent of those testing HIVpositive in 1996,
though they make up only 4 per cent of the B.C. population.

Then there's the issue of respect for our justice system, which goes far
beyond one district of Vancouver. The system is overloaded, and drugs have a
lot to do with it. The public comes to see the police and the courts as part
of one big, expensive revolving door for criminals; yet the police and the
judges and the corrections people are prisoners of the system, too.

Add to this bigtime money made in the drug trade and laundered into
straight society, the common belief that hemp is B.C.'s largest agricultural
export, the bad name given to some Asian countries and our refugee system
generally by the infiltration of drug criminals from abroad, and the drug
trade as the financial basis for motorcycle gangs. Why do we do this to
ourselves?

The answer is, we have imported an American approach to the drug question.
We would not dream of importing the Americans' gun laws or approach to
medicare, but we bought their drug approach lock, stock and barrel, in the
hysteria of the 1930's whipped up by Harry J. Anslinger, head of the Federal
Bureau of Narcotics. Those policies haven't worked for the Americans, and
they sure aren't working for us.

It is time for a rethink, and we have some good starting points. The
abovementioned Cain Report recommended a look at drug decriminalization.
The just received Penny Parry report to the Vancouver/Richmond Health Board,
dubbed "Something to eat, a place to sleep, and someone who gives a damn,"
raised the issue; it will be debated by the board on Nov. 27.

The Swiss government has just concluded a threeyear, 1,000 person
experiment in providing narcotics on a prescription basis to addicts. The
resulting increase in health and employment and dramatic reduction in crime
is outlined in a 12page Englishlanguage "Summary of the Synthesis Report"
issued by the Swiss Federal Office of Public Health.

The police know we need a better way. Vancouver Deputy Chief Ken Higgins was
part of a federal task force that recommended limited decriminalization last
May. He said recently, "If we wiped the chalkboard clean and said how would
we deal with the situation now, the last thing we'd want is the present
system."

The issue is ripe. It is time to give our politicians permission to "think
outside the box" on this one.