TORY DRUG STRATEGY MAKES PROBLEM WORSE

Changing Goal From Removing The Harm Of Drugs To Making Country 'Drug
Free' Is Not Working

Before Stephen Harper's Conservatives took power, an exhaustive
national consultative process led by Health Canada and the Canadian
Centre on Substance Abuse informed the development of Canada's
National Drug Strategy.

The painstaking and inclusive process, which involved all federal
political parties and virtually all stakeholder groups, aimed to
remove the rhetoric and emotion that have traditionally guided
Canada's response to illicit drugs and, instead, sought to incorporate
the best available scientific evidence into the fight against the drug
scourge.

The central aim of the strategy was "to ensure that Canadians can live
in a society increasingly free of the harms associated with
problematic substance use," and differed from the U.S. approach in
that it put emphasis on reducing harm, rather than the less pragmatic
goal of making society "drug free."

However, when the Tories assumed power in 2006, the results of this
exhaustive effort were thrown out before the strategy could be
implemented and a new Tory "Anti-Drug Strategy" was soon released.
Although the pre-existing drug strategy had been criticized by a 2001
auditor-general's report, which demonstrated that 93 per cent of
federal funding already went towards law enforcement, the Tories' new
anti-drug strategy redoubled the focus of Canada's drug control
efforts on law enforcement.

This re-aligned Canada's anti-drug efforts with the U.S.'s
longstanding "war on drugs," and documents obtained through freedom of
information requests have demonstrated the close collaboration between
Conservative cabinet ministers and senior bureaucrats from the Bush
White House in helping craft the Tories' anti-drug plans.

From a scientific perspective, the results of the Conservatives'
anti-drug strategy could have been anticipated well before it was
enacted. Under the Tories, arrests for drugs, particularly the
possession of marijuana, have increased, while drug supply and use has
been unaffected. Unfortunately, in addition to having been proven
ineffective at reducing drug supply, the American approach to dealing
with drugs has resulted in a number of severe unintended
consequences.

Most importantly, the global drug war has created a massive illicit
market, with an estimated annual value of $320 billion US. In some
cases, these enormous illegal revenues threaten the political
stability of entire regions, such as Mexico, several South American
countries and, more recently Afghanistan. Paradoxically,
ever-increasing drug enforcement expenditures have not prevented the
growth of this market; instead, a global long-term pattern of falling
drug prices and increasing drug purity and supply has been observed.

In terms of additional harms, in the U.S., where the war on drugs has
been fought most vigorously, the jailing of illicit drug offenders has
contributed to the world's highest incarceration rate. Primarily as a
result of drug-law enforcement, one in eight African-American males in
the age group 25 to 29 was incarcerated on any given day in the U.S.
in 2007, despite the fact that ethnic minorities consume illicit drugs
at comparable rates to other subpopulations in the U.S.

Although the U.S. is now aggressively moving away from mandatory
minimum sentences, the mandatory minimums for drug offences being
proposed by the Harper government should help reproduce this pattern
in Canada. If trends continue, it will likely be the first nations
population that is most affected by these new laws.

An additional concern is the consistent association between drug
prohibition and increased drug market violence. A recent international
example is the upsurge in severe drug-related violence in Mexico
coinciding with President Felipe Calderon's announcement of an
escalation in the fight against Mexican drug traffickers.

Locally, the rash of severe, drug-related gun violence plaguing
Vancouver is a direct result of Canada's approach to illicit drugs.

If one doubts the strong relationship between this violence and drug
prohibition, a useful reflection is to compare how trends in funding
for alcohol and drug prohibition in the U.S. have coincided with
trends in U.S. homicide rates.

Finally, there is a range of public health concerns directly stemming
from the war on drugs, and chief among these is the transmission of
HIV among injection drug users. In Canada, Vancouver's Downtown
Eastside has been hardest hit, but according to the UN Reference Group
on HIV and Injection Drug Use, it is estimated that the largest
numbers of drug injectors live in China, the U.S., and Russia.

It is no coincidence that these three nations also have among the
world's most punitive drug laws and lead the world in the number of
incarcerated individuals. This pattern is consistent with the findings
of the World Health Organization's World Mental Health Survey
Initiative, which found that countries with more stringent prohibitive
drug policies did not demonstrate lower levels of drug use than
countries with policies that focused on alternative approaches.

The unintended consequences of the U.S. drug control efforts recently
led to a unanimous resolution at the 2007 annual United States
Conference of Mayors which stated that "[t]he United States Conference
of Mayors believes the war on drugs has failed and calls for a new
bottom line in U.S. drug policy, a public health approach that
concentrates more fully on reducing the negative consequences
associated with drug abuse, while ensuring that our policies do not
exacerbate these problems or create new social problems of their own."

Unfortunately, in addition to massive funding directed towards law
enforcement and prisons, the U.S. war on drugs has also involved a
longstanding global public education effort aimed at reinforcing
public support for criminal justice approaches for dealing with drugs.
This makes strategies, such as those of the Harper Tories, politically
popular despite their proven ineffectiveness.

Evan Wood is director of the urban health program at the BC Centre for
Excellence in HIV/AIDS and associate professor in the department of
medicine at UBC.