FOR A SANER DRUG POLICY

As the Health Officers Council of British Columbia discusses its new paper
on drug control at this week's conference on drug use in Vancouver,
inevitably some waggish critic will demand, "What were they smoking?" The
paper's authors refuse to use the terms legalization and decriminalization,
saying they are too confusing. But if you read between the footnotes and
the graphs in A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada, the clear
implication of this approach would be the legalization of all drugs,
including heroin and cocaine, albeit under strict controls.

Moralists will denounce any notion of lifting criminal sanctions, because
it would seem to condone drug use. Realists will point out that if Canada
cannot risk legalizing marijuana for fear of U.S. reaction, it can hardly
start talking about taking possession and trafficking of cocaine and heroin
off the books. Both groups would do well to read the council's dry but sage
discussion paper.

The authors review the spectrum of control over psychoactive drugs, a
category that includes alcohol, tobacco, prescription painkillers and
illegal drugs. At one end, society widely tolerates and even promotes
drinking alcohol while placing tighter controls on smoking. At the other,
it makes the manufacture, sale and possession of marijuana, cocaine and
heroin illegal, driving them underground and fuelling crime. Both the legal
drinking and smoking and the illegal snorting and injecting come with a
huge social cost. The illegal drugs do less overall damage because they are
not as widely used, but they inflict more damage on the individuals who use
them.

The point is that neither end of the spectrum represents an effective drug
policy. The so-called paradox of prohibition suggests that the best
approaches lie somewhere in the middle. Tobacco use, for example, has been
greatly curtailed by education campaigns and anti-smoking bylaws.

What would this mean for the control of drugs such as marijuana, cocaine,
LSD and heroin? The authors list a wide range of possible regulatory
controls over consumption, including training users, rationing volumes,
limiting the places where drugs can be used and requiring proof of age,
residency and drug dependency. Corporate restrictions might include heavy
taxation and advertising bans. The greater the potential for harm from a
drug, the greater the level of control that would be enacted.

Clearly, Canadians are not going to vote to legalize hard drugs any time
soon, although public support for legalizing marijuana has been steadily
building since the 1970s and is approaching 50 per cent. However, this
welcome paper should help push the debate away from criminal sanctions and
toward the public-health model, with its sensible philosophy of reducing
crime, improving health, protecting children and using tax dollars more wisely.