GOV'T BETTER OFF TO GET SMART RATHER THAN TOUGH ON DRUG CRIME

Threats Of Prison Mean Nothing To Gang Members Engaged In Bloody
Battle To Profit From Drug Trade

In the late 1980s, long before Teletoon and Treehouse, there was a
weekly event called "Saturday morning cartoons." Among the commercials
for My Little Pony and Transformers, there were a number of public
service announcements. The most famous of these continues to inspire
spoofs on YouTube, 20 years later. A man holds up an egg and says, in
an authoritative voice, "This is your brain." Then he picks up a hot
frying pan and says, "This is drugs." He cracks the egg and spills it
into the pan. "This is your brain on drugs," he says, as the egg
sizzles. "Any questions?" Of course, in my high school, these public
service announcements were endlessly mocked. We knew, from the
headbangers and from Fast Times at Ridgemont High, that being fried
actually made you funny, popular and sexually active. Rock stars,
skateboarders, surfers and Robin Williams took drugs of various sorts.
Little did we know that a young Barack Obama was also on the cone.

Data are inconclusive, but most studies show that drug abuse rises
during both booms and recessions. In the boom of the 1970s, heroin was
the big drug. Crack cocaine, and crime, exploded in the recession
years of the late 1980s and early 1990s. Something new, or old, is
bound to rise up as the economy goes down in the coming months. The
recent spike in gang violence in Canada's big cities demonstrates that
economic problems for some are fantastic economic opportunities for
others -- and they're willing to kill for them.

The Conservative government is responding with a series of tough crime
bills designed to deter gang activity in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver
and Toronto. If the bills pass, and all signs from the opposition
parties are that they will, and quickly, gang killings will soon be
classified as first-degree murder. There will be mandatory minimum
sentences for drive-by shootings.

Stephen Harper announced this latest strategy in the war on gangs in
Vancouver, a few days ago. Peter Van Loan, federal public safety
minister, recently called it Canada's gang capital. If you're a gang
capital, you're a drug capital. And if gang wars and drug wars begin
in Vancouver, they'll be across the Rockies before springtime.

America has been declaring wars on drugs and gangs longer than I've
been alive. They spend billions on these wars, and on public service
announcements, yet the violence and the proliferation of illegal
narcotics only intensifies. Thousands of people die every year in
Mexico, in increasingly gruesome fashion, as President Felipe Calderon
fights his own U.S.-sponsored war on drugs and gangs.

"We got elected because we know the people of Canada want us to take a
tougher stand on crime," Harper said in Vancouver, surrounded by the
families of slain innocents, "(they) want us to deal toughly with
those who perpetrate these crimes." The problem in Mexico, in the
U.S., and in Canada, is that professional assassins are citizens of
another kingdom. They won't be deterred by a few more years in jail,
and they won't respect witnesses' right to testify because it's the
jolly right thing to do.

You would think that instead of simply getting tough, which has been a
spectacularly expensive and bloody failure in exemplar nations to the
south, Canada might get smart. Californians, partially driven by a
$42-billion budget deficit and partly driven by frustration with
gangs, syndicates and cartels, are currently considering legalizing
and regulating the $14-billion marijuana industry in that state.

As Harper met with law enforcement officials in Vancouver, advocates
for legalization and regulation demonstrated outside, making similar
arguments about their own $7.5-billion marijuana industry.

Even if we do legalize and regulate marijuana, which a special
committee of the Canadian Senate suggested in 2002, and which a slim
majority (53 per cent in May 2008) of Canadians support, it wouldn't
do much for cocaine, heroin and other street drugs -- except choke out
a major source of revenue for gangs.

The Canadian government might consider a new philosophy around
education.

Instead of trying to convince teenagers that using pot is somehow 39
degrees more damaging than drinking lemon gin straight out of the
bottle, we might start telling the truth: that every innocent hit,
toke, snort and shot we take is intimately connected to barbarism, to
gunshots and stabbings and beheadings in Edmonton, in Vancouver, in
Los Angeles, in Ciudad Juarez.

It sounds good to declare wars, but evidence shows it isn't possible
to enforce prohibition.

Honesty, frugality, courage and creativity do not necessarily add up
to soft on crime.