HOW TO MAKE ME SHUT UP ABOUT LEGALIZING DRUGS

The illicit drug trade is, despite its illicitness, a trade. It is an
economic activity. "It's like in any marketplace," RCMP Supt. Pat
Fogarty said last week. The only difference is that "these guys don't
resolve things through a court process."

The guys in question are the Lower Mainland gangsters whose bloodshed
has shocked Canadians and prompted the federal government to promise
tougher laws. And Fogarty is right. Fundamentally, the drug trade is
best understood not in terms of criminal law. It's economics that count.

Jeffrey Miron, an economist at Harvard University, has been studying
the drug trade for 15 years. He stresses that "drug-related violence"
has little to do with drugs.

Prohibition of "any commodity for which there's demand leads to
violence because the market is driven underground," he said in an
interview. "It has relatively little to do with the commodity that is
prohibited. It has almost everything to do with the fact that if you
make it illegal, people are going to resolve their disputes with
violence, not lawyers.

"If we banned coffee, we'd have a huge black market in coffee." And
thugs in the coffee trade would be blasting away at each other.

Miron stresses that prohibition is not like an on-off switch: Either a
commodity is illegal or it is not. It is a matter of degree. Drugs
like cocaine are illegal everywhere but the extent to which the law is
enforced and offenders are punished varies from country to country. It
also varies over time.

That fact is important to researchers like Miron. If prohibition is
causing violence, countries that are less strict in enforcing the law
should see less violence, while those that take a harder law should
see more.

And that's just what Miron and two colleagues found in a paper
published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Examining data spanning countries and decades, Miron and his
colleagues found things like arrest rates, capital punishment and gun
laws didn't explain the numbers.

But "the hypothesis that drug prohibition generates violence," they
concluded, "is generally consistent with the long time-series and
cross-country facts."

Miron's conclusion is sobering: If governments respond to gang
violence with tougher laws and crackdowns, they will ultimately
produce more violence.

Among western nations, none has fought the drug trade harder than the
U.S. And none has a murder rate close to that of the U.S. "I have one
set of estimates that maybe 50 per cent of homicides in the U.S. are
due to the prohibition of drugs," Miron says.

The best way to make a significant, lasting reduction in gang
violence, Miron contends, is to remove drugs from the black market.
They can be strictly regulated using any of a hundred different policy
models. But they must be legalized.

The police scoff at this. Gangsters would just move on to some other
lucrative enterprise, they say.

But this assumes lucrative enterprises are available that gangsters
are not now exploiting -- in defiance of economic theory and common
sense.

It's also contrary to experience. "We definitely see crime fall when
we make things legal," Miron says.

The most spectacular example can be seen on a chart of the American
homicide rate through the 1920s and 1930s. Through the first 13 years
of that two-decade period, the murder rate rose steadily. But then, in
1933, it begins a steep decline. A 40-per-cent rise in murders until
1933 was followed by a 40-per-cent decline.

There were no significant changes in 1933 that could explain the
turnaround -- except the legalization of alcohol and the end of the
13-year mistake known as Prohibition.

Look, I know the police are sick of me writing that their hard work is
worse than useless. To be honest, I'm sick of writing it, too.

So let's make a deal. Canada spends about $2 billion a year enforcing
the drug laws and yet we have very little solid research examining the
effectiveness of what we're doing. Not since the 1972 LeDain
commission report has the government taken a serious look at drug policy.

That's irresponsible. Drug policy is a critical factor in issues from
crime to disease, mental health, civil liberties and international
development. At this moment, Canadian soldiers are dying in a
narco-state.

So let's have a commission of inquiry that can gather the best
evidence from all over the world, analyze it properly and draw
conclusions without regard to political expediency.

Let the evidence decide. If the police and other supporters of the
status quo are confident they are right, they should welcome an
inquiry as a chance to silence the critics.

In fact, that's the deal I'm offering. Call for the creation of an
inquiry. Demand wide terms of reference, a serious research budget and
a respected voice to lead it.

Do that and I'll shut up.