PROHIBITION FAILING SPECTACULARLY

The shooters wore masks.

They brandished automatic weapons as they entered the Fortune
Happiness on Aug. 9. When they fled moments later, they left eight
young victims bleeding among shards of broken glass on the floor of
the East Broadway restaurant. Press reports breathlessly told of two
dead, six wounded, and speculated that the killings were gang-related.
If so, and it does seem likely, the shootings represent yet another
lethal event in the round of drug gang shootings we have seen over the
past few years in Lower Mainland communities. Within hours the news
was all over CNN, broadcast in heavy and lurid rotation on TV screens
around the world.

Since then, we've all been treated to three unwholesome and unhelpful
spectacles: the ongoing and shameless orgy of media voyeurism cited
above, the prime minister trying to turn the tragedy to political
advantage for his law and order Tories and a predictably self-serving
pitch from the city police arguing that they need more money and more
officers on the anti-gun beat. A bit more plausibly, and usefully, the
VPD cautioned against public panic, pointing out that violent crime is
actually in decline in the city. Clearly, then, there is no need for
Vancouverites to rush to the city exits for fear of being caught in
the cross-fire. There is a need, however, for long-deferred civic reflection.

Until we smarten up and decriminalize all drug use by adults, we will
see more bloody spectacles like the shootout at the Fortune Happiness.
Drug prohibition creates organized crime, super profits for criminals
and violence among competing drug groups.

It was true for the ill-advised attempts to criminalize alcohol during
Prohibition and it's true today.

Prohibition never works.

Our refusal to learn from the failed and tragic history of Prohibition
is one of the reasons those young people died at the Fortune
Happiness. Prohibition is a great and profitable gift to the Mafia and
its latter day successors, but it does nothing to achieve its
ostensible goals.

None of this is to suggest that the use of drugs like cocaine, heroin
and crystal meth is a good idea, or that we shouldn't use public money
for genuine drug education (as opposed to the saccharine and unhelpful
good intentions of "just say no" abstinence programs) to encourage
wiser choices than those represented by the noxious white powder drugs.

Cannabis, clearly, is another matter.

It has never made sense for us to impose legal or social sanctions on
the use of a benign plant product less destructive than alcohol or
tobacco.

Decriminalization, harm reduction and public education across the
board are the policies that might move us toward sanity on drug use in
Canada. The enormous progress made in the last generation in
discouraging tobacco use and reckless drunk driving point in the
direction of policy interventions that make more sense than pouring
more money into failed Prohibition attempts.

Economic reforms that left fewer people poor and desperate enough to
be drawn into destructive drug use would help, too. Harm reduction
tactics, like our city's threatened Insite supervised injection
project, represent wise public policy and use of tax dollars.

Prohibition and ramped up and intrusive police presence in poor
neighbourhoods, which is the most visible result of the war on drugs,
do not.

Removing the legal sanctions against use and possession of all drugs
may seem like a reckless experiment, but only if you can blind
yourself to the abject failure of the status quo. A turn to drug
policy sanity is required at the federal level, where criminal law is
shaped, but Vancouverites should have a special interest in calling
for such changes, and not just because of the latest bloody melodrama.
Our city has been a working experiment in drug prohibition now for far
too long, and the lethal results of that failed experiment are on
display every day in the streets of the Downtown Eastside as well as
in tragedies like the shootings at the Fortune Happiness.