GOVERNMENT ADDICTED TO 'WAR ON DRUGS'

Addiction is a terrible thing. When the addiction is to alcohol, hard
drugs, over-eating or gambling, it can rage through the addict's
physical and financial health like a forest fire, leaving lives in
charred ruins.

But equally destructive is government addiction to a ham-handed law
and order response to drug use, the much vaunted "war on drugs"
approach that has failed so spectacularly around the world over the
last century. Cloaked in self-congratulatory moralism and driving
billions of dollars in wasted public investment in counterproductive
enforcement and prisons, the simple minded "just say no to drugs"
approach popularized by that great public intellectual Nancy Reagan
and now espoused by the Harper government, has had many decades to
succeed if it ever was going to do so.

The results of that tragic experiment with the lives of North
Americans are in, and they are overwhelmingly bad. Criminalizing the
use of some addictive substances and not others--jailing junkies and
leaving those who swill Scotch alone, for example--makes no sense, and
the historical record makes it absolutely clear that prohibition
creates and empowers organized crime groups, and gangs that then
settle their business disputes with automatic weapons, as witness the
Lower Mainland's spate of drug gang-related shootings over the past
few years and the carnage being wreaked currently on Mexican civil
society as drug cartels shoot it out in border town streets.

The Harper government's latest move in its long-standing attempts to
be consistently on the wrong side of science and sanity in these
matters has been to take an appeal to the Supreme Court last week.
They are trying to close down Vancouver's pioneering supervised
injection site (Insite) by appealing a ruling at the B.C. Court of
Appeal that held the site has a constitutionally justified right to
exist. This is a shameful waste of taxpayer money and a threat to a
facility that saves lives and, ironically enough, given the nature of
the wrong headed criticism it has to endure, often puts addicts on the
road to recovery.

A statement issued this week by the International AIDS Society, the
International Society for Science in Drug Policy and the B.C. Centre
for Excellence is a useful contribution to sane public discussion on
drugs and drug policy.

The Vienna Declaration, launched for public discussion June 28, will
be the official statement of the upcoming AIDS 2010 conference to be
held in Austria in July.

The declaration reads, in part:

"The criminalisation of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV
epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social
consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed."

AIDS 2010 chair Dr. Julio Montaner, president of the IAS and director
of the B.C. Centre for Excellence, says in a press release promoting
the Vienna Declaration, "As scientists, we are committed to raising
our collective voice to promote evidence-based approaches to illicit
drug policy that start by recognizing that addiction is a medical
condition, not a crime."

Citizens of Vancouver should not leave the debate to the beleaguered
scientists and the self-serving politicians. We should all speak out
in favour of science-based drug policies, an end to prohibition and
increases in harm reduction services in our city.

A useful first step that is, unlike the Ottawa-sourced madness of the
latest attempt to kill the supervised injection site, within the power
of Vancouver politicians, has been suggested by the local Beyond
Prohibition Foundation. The folks at the foundation want the Vancouver
Police Department to be instructed that arresting pot smokers who
possess personal use quantities of the herb is a very low priority for
enforcement activities. This is only a modest step, and in my view
could usefully be extended to include personal use quantities of all
illegal drugs, but it would be a step in the right direction. That in
itself would be an intoxicating relief.