CANADA'S DRUG LAWS A DEADLY FAILURE -- IN AND OUT OF PRISONS

Three years ago, in January 2008, the Union of Canadian Correctional
Officers held a press conference to warn that babies and children
were being used to smuggle drugs into federal prisons.

Worse, the union added, was the fact kids and babies were not being
searched when entering the prisons with their moms to visit dad in
his barbed-wire home.

Topping off the madness was the fact a guard at Abbotsford's
medium-security Matsqui Institution faced disciplinary action from
the Correctional Service of Canada for calling the Ministry of
Children and Families after finding a stroller that tested positive
for cocaine.

Apparently, there was concern Terry Leger might have violated a
prisoner's privacy rights by trying to protect a child from a
possible career as a drug mule.

He also learned a baby's clothing had twice tested positive for
cocaine and meth and that the baby's mom had tested positive for
heroin and morphine residue in eight trips in a five-month period in 2007.

Incredibly, she was allowed to carry on her visit to the prison on
three of those occasions and the police were never called.

In January 2005 (and, undoubtedly, on many other occasions before and
since), a package with marijauna and ecstasy was tossed over the
fence at Matsqui, where it was picked up by guards before the inmates
could retrieve it.

There have also been drug-filled tennis balls, heroin-packed beanbags
and just about any other hollowed-out object tossed over fences of
prisons from Vancouver Island to Newfoundland.

And, of course, there are claims of guards smuggling drugs into prisons.

Douglas Foreman, who spent time in 11 prisons in Canada, told
rabble.ca in May of last year that 60 per cent of drugs flowing into
the prison system are being smuggled in by guards.

Such grand claims notwithstanding, in B.C., Roger Moore remains the
lone provincial corrections officer to be prosecuted for smuggling
drugs into jail.

He was convicted and was handed a four-year sentence in June 2009.

Elsewhere, however, there have been a litany of incidents of guards
smuggling drugs into prisons, including in Edmonton, Regina, Montreal
and St. John's in just the past few years.

Which brings us to the Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre and the
overdose death of inmate Dean Hopkins. How did he get the meth, pot
and heroin he was using in his cell?

Were the drugs smuggled in by a visitor? Were they brought in by
Hopkins or another remand inmate? Were they tossed over a fence? Were
they carried in by a staff member doing it voluntarily or because of blackmail?

We don't know, but if the powers-that-be were truly serious about
having a drug-free prison system, there is virtually nothing stopping
it from happening.

How? Nobody from the outside gets within a 50-yard field goal from a
perimeter fence. Every visitor -- man, woman, child and baby -- is
strip-searched upon entering the prison, including an inspection of
every orifice on the body. Every visitor is shadowed by a same-gender
guard when using the washroom. Every visitor leaves all bags at the
front desk. No visitor may touch an inmate. All guards reporting for
work submit to body searches before beginning their shifts. For good
measure, drug-sniffing dogs will man the entrances of every prison in Canada.

Too onerous? Too difficult to accomplish?

Then we are not serious about eliminating drugs from inside prisons
because it can be done if the will is there.

But, it is not, and not least because a sometimes-medicated
incarcerated populace -- of which an estimated 80 per cent has a drug
addiction, according to the federal Department of Public Safety -- is
much preferable to an incarcerated populace itching for a fix.

That's not the official view, but talk to some veteran guards for the
true picture.

Perhaps a regulated, legal drug market could have prevented Hopkins'
overdose death. Perhaps it wouldn't have made a difference.

The point is, inside and outside prisons, Canada's drug laws are a
deadly failure.