WAR ON DRUGS JUST NOT A WINNABLE ONE

That Doesn't Mean It Shouldn't Be Fought

An international commission whose members include such high flyers as
British billionaire Richard Branson, former UN boss Kofi Annan and
former Colombian president Cesar Gaviria makes a compelling case that
the so-called war on drugs has failed.

And its hard-hitting report was immediately welcomed Thursday by such
high-profile local commentators as Simon Fraser University
criminologist Neil Boyd ("it strikes me as quite rational") and
Cannabis Culture editor Jodie Emery ("everybody of a rational mind
recognizes that drug prohibition has failed").

However, I'm not so sure that the Global Commission on Drug Policy's
prescription for success, namely far greater drug liberalization, is
the magic bullet it's so often cracked up to be, at least in our
drug-saturated part of the world.

We have, after all, had drug liberalization in Vancouver for years.
And it's doubtful whether it has worked better than the
zero-tolerance alternative.

Look no further than the open drug market that continues to operate
in the Downtown Eastside under the nose of police. Does it make you
proud to be a British Columbian?

As the commission itself points out, Portugal in 2001 became the
first European country to decriminalize the use and possession of all
illicit drugs. And the result has been underwhelming. In fact, a 2010
report detected "a slight increase" in overall drug use there.

Besides, as former downtown Vancouver police officer Al Arsenault
pointed out to me yesterday, just because the war on drugs cannot be
won, doesn't mean we shouldn't fight it. "Neither can the war on
child porn [be won]," he noted, "but that does not mean that we give
up and legalize it."

Arsenault blasted the report's implication that drug users do no harm
to others: "Drug users do hurt other peopletheir own families and the
communities in which they live. They hurt themselves. Is that not enough?"

But the commission is essentially right: The global war on drugs has
failed, with devastating consequences. Indeed, you wonder why
commission members like Annan and Gaviria didn't do more about it
when they were in office.

The United Nations, it notes, conservatively estimates there are 250
million drug users in the world, with millions more involved in drug
cultivation, production and distribution: "We simply cannot treat
them all as criminals." No, indeed, we cannot.

Now, as something of a libertarian, I remain conflicted about the
problem of illegal drugs. I don't really like the state telling me
what I can or cannot ingest.

But I also realize that most, if not all, illegal drugs are illegal
for a good reason. And I think children and other vulnerable people
deserve protection from them, just as they do from prescription drugs.

Certainly, we in the media need to stop glamorizing illegal drug use
or pretending that drug legalization alone will solve the world's
deep-rooted narcotics problems.

The solution, if one can even talk of one, will necessarily be
imperfect. And it will rely on equal doses of education, regulation .
. . and, yes, enforcement.

The war on tobacco, which appears to have been relatively successful
in Canada, has combined all three. Let's learn from that.