POLICY OF PROHIBITION A FAILURE

I was appointed to the provincial court of British Columbia on Feb. 15, 1975.

I retired on Aug. 13, 2003.

During those 28 years, I presided over at least 1,000 cases, some big, most
small, involving the possession or sale of illegal drugs.

Bail hearings, trials, guilty pleas, applications to forfeit property - I
took notes on each one.

And a scan of those notes makes it clear that nothing much has changed: the
same number of people are still choosing to ingest mood-altering
substances, the same proportion are addicted and there is the same
persistent, but increasingly lucrative and efficient system of supply.

Over those years we - citizens, police, judges - lived and worked within
the orthodoxy that all drugs are inherently evil (except, of course,
alcohol) and that prohibition and punishment can rid us of them.

How wrong we were.

So wrong, it is distressing to consider the evils we spawned in our
hopeless attempt to impose criminal sanctions for private choices.

The inclination in humans, other mammals, birds and even some insects to
seek out mind-altering substances is innate. Leaving aside the substantial
research on the subject, any observant person can see the enduring
popularity of everything from coffee and tobacco to alcohol and ecstasy.
There is, always was and always will be a demand for such substances and,
therefore, there will always be a supply.

Which is not to suggest that drugs are harmless. In fact, it is their very
potential for harm that, more than anything else, highlights the abject
failure of the policy of prohibition. But almost all present-day
non-medical drugs, properly regulated and taken with care, can provide a
respite from the toil, strife and illness that life inevitably serves up,
whether you are a Kurdish goat-herder smoking hashish or a Vancouver school
teacher sipping a scotch.

We have already conceded that much in our acceptance of alcohol, a serious
intoxicant we can consume without being criminals but which we recognize as
dangerous when not consumed in moderation or consumed by those too young to
deal with its effects.

In the face of that innate desire, prohibition becomes nothing more than an
irresistible force butting up against an immovable object.

Incredible as it may seem, there are no up-to-date reliable statistics on
illegal drug use in Canada, although the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse
will be releasing this month the results of its first comprehensive survey
since 1994.

There are two other options available to determine if the policy of
prohibition has had any impact during its almost century-old lifetime:
American information and statistics on drug crimes in British Columbia.

The Americans are far more rabid in their approach to drugs so it would be
reasonable to assume that drug consumption there has fallen. Not so. From
the mid-1960s to 2002, marijuana and cocaine use among 18- to 25-year-olds
increased from five per cent to 54 per cent and from one per cent to 15.4
per cent, respectively.

That growth has taken place not only in the face of the threat of serious
jail time for possession of even small amounts and "three-strikes" laws,
but also in spite of draconian laws in a number of states that prohibit the
drug convict, upon release, from collecting welfare, living in public
housing, receiving food assistance, obtaining a driver's licence, securing
student loans or applying for a job with any government department or agency.

The B.C. drug crime rate is no more encouraging to the drug warriors.
Between 1993 and 2002, the incidence of cannabis and cocaine convictions
rose 66 per cent and 48 per cent respectively with no significant increase
in policing and prosecution efforts.

Government has a legitimate role in the regulation of recreational drugs
because they are potentially poisonous substances. Only the purest
free-marketer would advocate an unregulated market. The LeDain Report of
1973, still one of the most careful, thorough, balanced and well-written
explorations of modern non-medical drug use, contains a sort of
cost-benefit analysis of the various options for the regulation of drugs.
It concludes that prohibition is one of the least desirable approaches.

Recognizing that drug use "is too deeply rooted and too pervasive to be
eliminated entirely," the report identifies four good reasons not to resort
to prohibition.

First, it creates an illicit market, an irresistible playing field for
serious criminals.

Furthermore, all those offences that are reported as "drug-related" are
nothing of the kind. They are prohibition-related. A black market grossly
inflates the price of drugs, forcing the addict into petty crime to pay for
his drugs. We never read that an alcoholic has broken into someone's home
to get what he needs, because he buys his addictive substance in a
regulated market at a reasonable price. And, except for alcohol (a
substance at the root of well greater than half of all criminal charges),
offences committed because of the influence of a drug are as rare as
asteroid hits.

Second, it inhibits any efforts to seek help or treatment when consumption
gets out of hand and it constrains the creation of resources for those
purposes.

Third, it inhibits education about the dangers of drugs. If the law
prohibits them outright, it is difficult to discuss them, particularly with
teenagers, in the context of a wise exercise of freedom of choice.

Finally, prohibition places a disproportionate demand on law-enforcement
resources. By 2001, policing drugs in Canada (just drugs themselves, not
"drug-related" offences) cost $500 million a year, an amount that
significantly exceeded the amount, over the same period of time, spent on
the vilified gun-registry program -and with apparently as little bang for
the taxpayer's buck.

Add to those unfortunate results the demonizing of citizens whose only sin
is to become addicted to the wrong drug, as well as the corruption of
enforcement officials and the erosion of civil liberties that inevitably
creep into investigation of victimless crimes, and the picture is truly dismal.

But the most telling consequence has been the inevitable unreliability, in
a black market, of the quality and strength of the product - or its
outright misidentification - and the resulting threat of serious illness or
death from overdose, let alone the spread of AIDS and hepatitis from needle
re-use.

In other words, if the regulation of poisons is a reasonable pursuit of
government, one which justifies a policy in the first place, prohibition
has enhanced, not diminished, the poisonous potential of street drugs.

The federal government has said repeatedly over the past two decades that
misuse of drugs is a health issue. It is past time that it acted
accordingly, shelved its costly and useless policy of prohibition and
created a rational structure to deal with all non-medical drug use, the one
presently in use for alcohol: a system of regulated distribution. At a
stroke, we would destroy the black market, remove a principal source of
revenue for organized crime and terrorist groups, free up hundreds of
millions of dollars now spent on enforcement and corrections, create a new
source of government revenue - to be devoted to drug treatment and
education - and greatly reduce the incidence of property crime.

Only two things stand in its way. The first is the Law of Natural Inertia
of Governing Bodies: if a policy would be bold, socially beneficial and
fiscally prudent, but risky with the electorate and requiring the overhaul
of entrenched structures, study it some more. The second is the anticipated
response from our neighbours to the south.

Neither can justify persisting in such a demonstrable failure.