THE WAR ON DRUGS HAS BECOME A WAR AGAINST US

When former U.S. president Richard Nixon first used the term "war on
drugs" in 1969, it was a mere metaphor. While the term referred to a
number of measures ostensibly designed to combat illicit drug use, it
in no way signified a real war.

It does now. From Colombia to British Columbia, with stops in Mexico
and the United States, the war on drugs has become indistinguishable
from a real war, replete with military campaigns, insurgent groups,
countless combat deaths and collateral damage.

In 2008, British Columbia experienced a record 140 homicides, 30 per
cent of which police believe are the result of gang activity.
Mexico's drug war claimed the lives of more than 6,000 people in
2008, and in the first two months of 2009, another 1,000 people had
died. As the escalating violence and consequent destabilization of
countries like Mexico and Colombia demonstrate, this once
metaphorical war has become a literal one.

This is a curious result since governments have long maintained that
drug prohibition is necessary to combat drug use, that law
enforcement forms an essential part of reducing the harms associated
with illicit drugs. But given the anecdotal evidence, many critics
have charged that the drug war is causing the very problems it was
meant to solve.

Now the evidence is no longer merely anecdotal: Researchers with the
Urban Health Research Initiative of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in
HIV/ AIDS recently conducted a systematic review of all
Englishlanguage scientific literature that evaluated the association
between drug prohibition and violence. And in a paper released today,
the researchers note that 13 out of 15 studies found that drug law
enforcement was associated with increasing levels of drug-market violence.

The authors offer a simple theory to explain these studies'
observations: Prohibition creates a massive and lucrative illicit
market for drugs, one estimated to be worth as much as $320 billion
US globally, and $7 billion Cdn in B.C. This creates enormous
financial opportunities for organized crime, and where organized
crime dares to tread, violence inevitably follows.

What's worse, there is little evidence that drug prohibition has
achieved its primary goal of reducing drug supply and use. On the
contrary, illicit drugs "have become cheaper, their purity has
increased, and rates of use have not markedly changed."

In the face of this evidence, one would expect politicians and
policy-makers to search for alternatives to the criminalization of
illicit drugs. The British Columbia Health Officers Council has, for
example, recently encouraged the federal government to revise the
Controlled Drugs and Substances Act and "create regulatory frameworks
for drugs."

Yet the federal Conservatives, with little opposition from the
Liberals and NDP, are forging ahead with increasing criminalization
in the form of Bill C-15, which will impose mandatory prison
sentences for certain drug crimes.

The impact of such measures is predictable: We will not likely see a
decrease in drug use, but we will see an increase in prison
populations, which will place an additional burden on taxpayers. And
worst of all, there's reason to believe we will also see an increase
in drug-related violence.

Consequently, report co-author Evan Wood, who was recently named
Junior Doctor of the Year by the British Medical Journal, comments,
"The willingness of our current government to push blindly forward
with a war on drugs approach without considering the likely community
impacts and the impact on the taxpayer is very alarming."

This is a view that evidently cuts across the political spectrum.
Indeed, reviewers who hold a conservative or libertarian outlook,
such as Harvard University's Jeffrey Miron, the Fraser Institute's
Steve Easton and Conservative Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, have
endorsed the report.

One would think the government would listen to these Conservative
voices even if it wishes to remain wilfully blind to the scientific
evidence. But if not, it will be up to taxpayers to voice their alarm
with the government's current course. For as the literature
demonstrates, the war on drugs is a war on us.