A PLAN TO WIN DRUG WAR

Signs are surfacing that new kinds of vested interests are seizing the
drug control agenda.

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
Columbia.

It also reveals how worldwide deaths from illicit drugs at around
200,000 a year pale in comparison to deaths from legal psychoactive
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 despite their having
vested political and economic interests in the status quo.

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 from 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 some $100
million a year available for harm reduction 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
sixties 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.

Compare this with what is happening today in Canada's downtown
cores.

The public policy implications 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.

Margret Kopala wrote this column for the Ottawa Citizen.