HOW TO WIN THE DRUG WAR

There has been little mention in this election campaign of the most
pernicious evil of our time. Yet recent reports from a UN agency
leave little doubt that the war against drugs is being won and that,
with full engagement, victory is if not possible, then very nearly possible.

The World Drug Report 2008 launched in June by the United Nations
Office on Drugs and Crime reveals how opium and cocoa cultivation,
whose heroin and cocaine extractions are the scourge of Canada's
inner cities, are now largely confined to rebel-held areas in
Aghanistan and Colombia. It also reveals how worldwide deaths from
illicit drugs at around 200,000 a year pale in comparison to deaths
from legal substances such as cigarettes (five million a year), and
alcohol (2.5 million). "The drug problem was dramatically reduced
over the past century," says UNODC executive director Antonio Maria
Costa, "and has stabilized over the past 10 years."

In other words, prohibition works.

This was apparent when U.S. per capita alcohol consumption dropped
from 7.1 gallons to 1.8 gallons a year during the 1920s but the need
to control psychoactive substances was apparent well before the
American prohibition era. During the 19th century, opium was a
lucrative, openly traded commodity, with 25 per cent of the Chinese
male population using and tens of millions addicted. The Shanghai
Opium Commission successfully assembled world leaders to confront the crisis.

We've come a long way since then but signs are surfacing that new
kinds of vested interests are seizing the drug control agenda.
Blogging on Vancouver's Downtown Eastside Enquirer, for instance,
reveals the menacing ascendance of the medical industrial complex.
Serviced by numerous medical organizations, it works in tandem with a
burgeoning poverty industry that residents call the "povertariat."

"Show me a spokesperson touting the success of Insite (the
controversial supervised injection site), and I will show you someone
economically invested in the medical-industrial complex," says
Reliable Source on the Enquirer site. Those profiting "must
constantly manufacture case files to attract public funding. The
result is a case file economy." With millions a year available for
harm reduction-related initiatives that keep addicts on drugs while
purporting to reduce their harm, the attractions of the case-file
economy are self-evident.

More disturbing is how major steps toward legalizing drugs are under
way in British Columbia courts where injection of illicit drugs has
been made a health issue (the decision is being appealed). As the UN
report observes, what damage could drugs cause if they proliferated
the way opium did in 19th-century China?

"Sweden's Successful Drug Policy: A Review of the Evidence," released
by UNODC last year lights a clear path forward on this issue.

Sweden's drug policies were built on the theories of psychiatrist
Nils Bejerot. He challenged the view -- widely held in Sweden in the
'60s when psychoactive drugs were available by prescription as a harm
reduction measure -- that addiction was a health problem. Deaths in
the general population where such lethal substances would inevitably
find their way confirmed Bejerot's argument that addiction was a
learned behaviour made possible by the availability of drugs, time,
money, user role models and a permissive ideology. This behaviour
could be "unlearned," he said; treatment should therefore focus on
being drug-free and governments should promote zero tolerance.

Sweden has since adopted the vision of a drug free society. Treatment
for addiction is easily obtained and, under special circumstances,
compulsory. Schools teach children about the dangers of drugs from a
very early age. Small-scale, as well as organized crime, is
prosecuted. The result is drug use figures that routinely score at
the bottom of European charts while public safety issues around
disease transmission and crime commission remain firmly in control.

The public policy implications in Canada are clear. Daily drug busts
demonstrate that Canadian police forces are doing their part to
control supply. Their efforts, however, are being undermined by harm
reduction initiatives which merely serve the vested interests of the
Taliban, drug dealers and Canada's burgeoning medical industrial
complex while addicts remain victimized -- first by their habit and
then by those exploiting them.