OLD WAR ON DRUG ABUSE NEEDS A NEW DIRECTION

It's the definition of insanity -- repeating the exact same behaviour
time and time again, expecting different results.

This would be the war on drugs. The current approach to illegal drugs
- -- essentially prohibition -- has consumed billions of dollars, yet
access to illicit, ever-cheaper street drugs and the impact of drug
addiction on this community and thousands of others continues to
consume more and more resources, and people.

This failure has begun to be noticed by many people here and around
the world.

In a longer than usual debate last week, Red Deer city council decided
to ignore recommendations from its crime prevention advisory
committee, choosing instead to support an entirely different approach
to illicit drug use.

It was a split vote -- hopefully it doesn't also split the
community.

Mayor Morris Flewwelling, Councillors Cindy Jefferies, Paul Harris,
Dianne Wyntjes and Lynne Mulder voted in favour of supporting the
Vienna Declaration. Councillors Chris Stephan, Tara Veer, Buck
Buchanan and Frank Wong voted against it.

Don't anyone panic. You won't see much change in Red Deer regarding
the current approach to illicit drug use.

Council's vote to support the Vienna Declaration was the easy part.
The hard part will take years to implement, by way of changing the
current widely held (but ineffective) mindset that illicit drugs
should be treated with the ideology of prohibition, enforcement and
incarceration.

City council also endorsed the development of a specific drug strategy
in the city that focuses on the four pillars approach -- prevention,
treatment, harm reduction and enforcement.

The Vienna Declaration essentially calls for a science-based approach
to drug policy -- and looks at illegal drug use as a health and safety
issue.

"The criminalization 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," say the
declaration.

It goes on: the illicit drug market is worth an estimated US$320
billion annually -- profits outside government control -- and fuels
crime, violence and corruption in countless communities, and
destabilizes entire countries such as Columbia, Mexico and
Afghanistan.

The declaration -- adopted at last year's international AIDS conference
in Vienna -- calls for a transparent view of current drug policies'
effectiveness, a science-based public health approach to deal with
individual and community harms from illegal drug use.

There's more, but perhaps what may be most meaningful today in Red
Deer is this part: ". . . involve members of the affected community in
developing, monitoring and implementing services and policies that
affect their lives."

Yes, having a conversation with those in this community who use, abuse
and are addicted to illicit drugs would be a good starting point to
begin to change how we can effectively deal with the problem.

The declaration acknowledges that the science-based approach won't
eliminate drug use or related drug-injection problems but it would
allow the huge dollars spent now on fighting illicit drug use to be
redirected to "evidence-based prevention, regulatory, treatment and
harm reduction interventions."

Those involved in forming the Vienna Declaration included a committee
of more than 30 drug policy, health and human rights experts. The
declaration focuses on drug users, not those who sell or produce
illegal drugs.

In Canada, the cities of Toronto, Vancouver and Victoria -- and now Red
Deer -- have publicly declared support for the Vienna
Declaration.

One member of Red Deer council, Chris Stephan, felt the support would
bring shame on council because the declaration supports
decriminalizing drug users.

"It's a slap in the face to personal accountability, responsibility,
to being a good citizen," Stephan said at council.

Yet, after over 40 years, the current approach to drug users has
failed.

So the answer is to criminalize drug users? To build more prisons to
house them? In prisons where illicit drug use and the spread of HIV is
common.

"Data from Portugal, the Netherlands, Switzerland and other settings
suggest that public health-oriented illicit drug policies have
resulted in positive and sustained reductions in a variety of harms
from drug use," states the Vienna Declaration committee on its website.

To argue the war on drugs has been successful is like arguing that
organized crime hasn't earned a nickle from it.

Council's decision to support the Vienna Declaration is a brave one.