DECRIMINALIZE IT, SOCIETY SAYS

Criminalizing drug use causes more social problems than it solves, a
Kelowna business audience heard Wednesday.

"We have created an environment that is friendly to organized crime,
that rewards organized crime," Craig Jones, executive director of the
John Howard Society of Canada, told people attending a chamber of
commerce luncheon. "That incentive is called drug prohibition. We
cannot make drug prohibition work better, and it is futile to try."

Many chronic offenders and drug users suffer from mental illness, the
effects of personal trauma, homelessness and fetal alcohol syndrome,
Jones said.

Simply punishing these people for drug use, with imprisonment, "adds
injury to what is already a deeply injured person," Jones said.

He called for the establishment in Kelowna of a community court
system, which emphasizes trying to help an offender deal with problems
through rehabilitation and treatment instead of incarceration.

The failure of a punishment-based approach to drug use is evident in
the United States, Jones said.

Long sentences are routinely handed out for relatively minor charges,
and the U.S. has one of the world's highest incarceration rates. Yet
crime and drug use are still prevalent in the U.S., Jones said.

A better example, he said, can be found in Portugal, which moved to
decriminalize drug use in 2001. Since then, drug use and drug-related
crime have declined in the European country, Jones said.

After Jones' address, Kelowna chamber of commerce president Weldon
LeBlanc said the organization's official position is that drug use
should not be decriminalized.