PROHIBITION OF MARIJUANA IS RESPONSIBLE FOR MUCH OF THE GANG VIOLENCE
BOTH HERE AND ELSEWHERE

All of Vancouver has been shocked by the city's increasing gang
violence. Sadly, the gunplay on Dec. 12, where 10 people were shot
exiting a restaurant on Oak Street, is an occurrence that has become
increasingly common in Canadian cities, and gang violence has long
been a fact of life in most large U.S. cities. While reasons for gang
affiliation are complex, there is no arguing that urban gangs -- and
virtually all other well-funded organized crime groups for that
matter -- derive their primary source of revenue from the trade in
illegal drugs.

This violent reality has emerged as an unintended consequence of a
more than a half-century long experiment aimed at reducing illegal
drug supply through aggressive law enforcement. Remarkably, despite
the U.S. taxpayer spending an estimated $2.5 trillion since America's
"War on Drugs" was launched by former president Richard Nixon, drugs
remain more available today than at any time in our history, while
drug market violence has continued to worsen. A recent international
example is the upsurge in drug-related violence in Mexico, which has
claimed more than 30,000 lives after Mexican President Felipe
Calderon launched a crackdown on the cartels in 2006.

Around the world, virtually all leading economists who have
considered this issue have stressed that any effective enforcement
effort that successfully imprisons drug dealers has the immediate
perverse effect of making it that much more profitable for new drug
dealers to get into the drug supply business. Whether it's coffee
beans or cannabis, if you cut off supply, price goes up. Scientific
research has also proven that successful law enforcement
interventions that remove key members of drug gangs often lead to an
increase in bloodshed as lower level members or competing gangs fight
to maintain or gain market share.

Given the key contribution of cannabis prohibition to the growing
success of organized crime in B.C., we must ask if there are
measurable benefits of this extremely costly and violence-producing
policy. With respect to limiting cannabis availability to young
people, surveillance systems funded by the U.S. National Institutes
of Health have concluded that over the last 30 years of cannabis
prohibition the drug has remained "almost universally available to
American 12th graders."

These U.S. data are undoubtedly applicable to Canadian youth given
that these statistics were derived in a setting that spends an
estimated $10 billion each year enforcing marijuana laws. Research
funded by the U.S. government also clearly demonstrates that, even as
federal funding for anti-drug efforts increased by more than 600 per
cent over the last several decades, marijuana's potency has
nevertheless increased by 145 per cent since 1990, and its price has
declined 58 per cent. For many of the above reasons, as well as the
potential to generate a massive amount of tax revenue, a 2004 Fraser
Institute report called for the outright legalization of cannabis,
and a recent Angus Reid poll found that two thirds of British
Columbians would legalize cannabis to reduce gang violence.

Despite a long-standing federally funded "public education" campaign
aimed at shoring up U.S. public support for the nation's war on
drugs, a regulatory framework for cannabis was narrowly defeated in
California this fall when a statewide ballot initiative proposing to
"Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis" was supported by 46 per cent of voters.

In 1937, the year the U.S. criminalized the use of cannabis, the
Commissioner of U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger
testified to Congress, reportedly saying that "marijuana is the most
violence-causing drug in the history of mankind." In fact, there is
clear consensus in the medical and scientific community that cannabis
is substantially less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.

In fact, it is cannabis prohibition rather than the drug itself that
has fuelled the mounting violence. British Columbia is in desperate
need of political leadership to promote a regulated system for
cannabis control rather than the violent unregulated market that only
benefits organized crime. Without a regulated cannabis control system
to starve gangs of this financial windfall, we will without question
see more gun violence and the continued growth of organized crime in
this province.