WAR ON DRUGS A COSTLY FAILURE

Vancouver's safe injection site program has angered the U.S.-dominated
UN Drug Control Agency. This is not merely a question of tactics; it
represents a broad philosophical difference between America's
crime-punishment model ("war on drugs"), and Vancouver's
illness-treatment approach ("harm control").

The crime-punishment approach holds that human beings are entirely
responsible for their behavior, which presupposes choice and hence,
free will.

Philosophically, the question of free will versus determinism is
unresolved and probably always will be. But, while free will may only
be a convenient fiction, people must be held responsible for their
acts if relationships, community, and social order are to succeed. As
Isaac Bashevis Singer once wryly remarked, "We have to believe in free
will. We have no choice."

Even so, two relevant questions are: 1) Under what circumstances do
people choose, and 2) Who is harmed by their choice? Criminal law
broadly recognizes circumstances in assessing guilt and punishment.

As for harm, many drug users live respectable lives because they have
enough money to support their addiction. Poor addicts are driven to
crime or prostitution to purchase drugs. While rich addicts seek
pleasure, poor addicts attempt to escape misery.

The illness-treatment approach makes no moral judgements. It seeks
pragmatically to reduce suffering by, and danger to, the people most
affected, which translates into a drug policy of minimizing overdose
deaths and reducing needle-transmitted contagion.

It might, in time, also provide drugs, removing the need for addicts
to steal or prostitute themselves.

Some critics of this approach are concerned over what they perceive as
the increasing "psychiatrization," of society, i.e., seeing aberrant
behavior as a mental, perhaps a biochemical, problem rather than as a
moral and legal transgression, thereby eroding the concepts of "good"
and "evil."

Both approaches have been put to political use. Moral judgements have
become instruments of foreign policy, as witness Ayatollah Khomeini's
"great Satan," and Bush's "axis of evil" rhetoric. On the other hand,
political psychiatry, as it was practised in the U.S.S.R., was used to
discredit and incarcerate political opponents of the regime.

While the two approaches are often expressed as conflicting
ideologies, the difference between them may never be resolved and we
may have to live with the imperfections of either choice.

Most physicists now favour indeterminism but can the lessons
sub-atomic phenomena be extended to human behavior?

The war on drugs has been a costly failure in human and monetary
terms.

Isn't it time a different approach was tried?