THE WAR ISN'T WORKING

Last week, Canadians heard howls of protest that Stephen Harper hadn't
attended the World AIDS Conference in Vienna, and that Health Minister
Leona Aglukkaq had "failed" to sign the Vienna Declaration on global
antidrug policy. This did not speak well of Canadian politics, which
can be insufferably myopic.

It seems no other G20 leader attended the conference, and certainly no
world leader or health minister has signed, or would dare sign, the
Vienna Declaration -- which essentially calls for a wholesale
reassessment of our current approach to fighting drug trafficking and
addiction.

That's their problem, not the declaration's: We endorse the call for a
wholesale drug policy rethink.

But until the political zeitgeist changes there's no point hurling
rotten fruit at Mr. Harper or any other cheerleader for the status
quo. Far better to persuade them their position is untenable. And the
Vienna Declaration does an admirable job of that, in clear,
non-hysterical language. "The evidence that law enforcement has failed
to prevent the availability of illegal drugs, in communities where
there is demand, is now unambiguous," it reads. "Over the last several
decades, national and international drug surveillance systems have
demonstrated a general pattern of falling drug prices and increasing
drug purity -- despite massive investments in drug law enforcement."
The source of these wild-eyed claims? A report from the United States
Office of National Drug Control Policy, circa George W. Bush.

The costs of the war on drugs have been staggering to its developing
world battlegrounds. Fifteen years ago it was the Colombian cartels
battling each other, their government's forces and Washington, at a
cost of billions of dollars and thousands of lives.

Now, as Colombia flirts hesitantly with stability, it's Mexican
President Felipe Calderon's war on his own country's incredibly
powerful, ruthless and corrupting drug gangs, at a cost of 23,000
lives since 2006. Most recently, it was a weeks-long battle in the
slums of Kingston between Jamaican forces and the heavily armed
supporters of cocaine kingpin Christopher "Dudus" Coke -- at a cost of
73 lives on an island where the cocoa leaf doesn't even grow. All of
it to feed the habits of Americans and Canadians, and all backed and
financed by their capitals.

Statistics suggest rates of drug usage are falling gradually in
Canada, and that's good news --but no one could claim with a straight
face that this is down to a lack of supply, or that criminal
traffickers are considering going straight en masse.

One doesn't have to believe drugs are physiologically or morally
harmless, or to support harm reduction efforts like Vancouver's Insite
safe injection clinic (about which we are skeptical), or even advocate
(as we do) the decriminalization of the marijuana trade, to endorse
the declaration's most basic demand: that governments "undertake a
transparent review of the effectiveness of current drug policies" and
"implement and evaluate a science-based public health approach to
address the individual and community harms stemming from illicit drug
use."

Again, we don't expect Mr. Harper (who is ideologically committed to
prohibition) or Ms. Agluqqak (who is ideologically committed to Mr.
Harper) to sign on to such a document.

But along with many prominent activists, medical researchers and Nobel
laureates, the Vienna Declaration's signatories include Ernesto
Zedillo, Cesar Gaviria and Fernando Henriqui Cardoso, the former
presidents, respectively, of Mexico, Colombia and Brazil. They know
whereof they speak.

Perhaps their fellow ex-presidents, ex-prime ministers and ex-health
ministers might consider speaking up. We recall in particular a
certain Liberal prime minister from Shawinigan, who used to claim to
want to decriminalize marijuana.

His successor times three, Michael Ignatieff, now postures as an avid
prohibitionist whose public position amounts to "pot is bad, so it
should be illegal." This is not progress.

There's nothing impossible about adopting a more sensible, less
brutalizing alternative to what Conrad Black has called the "corrupt,
sociopathic war on drugs." Impossible would be trying to sell the
current approach to the world, knowing what we know now. Important
people who realize this must make their voices heard.

Enough innocent people have died.