TAKE UP THE SLACK ON DRUG RUNNERS

To the editor:

In Vancouver Nov. 6, former B.C. Premier Mike Harcourt urged all-out war on
the supposed kingpins of organized crime in Vancouver. He insisted that the
police, courts, and the public unite courageously with resources as weapons
adequate to tackle those at the top of the crime pyramid -- biker gangs,
Russian gangs, Asian gangs, the Mafia, the real hard-nosed criminals.

Addressing the annual Canadian Congress on Criminal Justice, Harcourt urged
all of us to "give the police the resources they need to focus on these
people" so that their assets can be seized and their businesses closed.
"Treat them like the scumbags they are," he declared, fingering these
kingpins as the really big money-makers profiting from drugs supplied to
Vancouver's 6,000 drug addicts who, according to police estimates, finance
their expensive habits by committing 80 per cent of the city's crimes.
Apart from the toll of wasted human lives, I wonder just how many dollars
are consequently being filched from our taxpayer wallets. Ponder all the
sundry judicial, correctional and rehabilitation expenses connected with
this monstrous situation.

What those addicts need is treatment, not punishment, and what the kingpins
need is 25-year "life sentences" served for the full 25 years, Harcourt
emphasized. The former NDP premier's insights are soundly reinforced from a
background that also includes experience as a defence attorney and
chairmanship of the Vancouver Police Board during his years as mayor.

While Harcourt didn't elaborate on the specific resources required for this
war, one could conclude that this means stepped-up surveillance and
increased wiretaps. Thus, more public cash and a loosening of stringent
privacy and human rights regulations if fire is to be fought with fire.
Surely, that can be accomplished without danger of drifting into a police
state, as some might contend.

Commenting on Harcourt's remarks later, B.C. Solicitor-General Rich Coleman
called upon the federal government to give law-enforcement officials more
legal tools. To fight organized gangs, these officials are counting on
Ottawa to introduce stronger penalties and tax reforms to track the
proceeds of crime. Yep, I say, like the day before yesterday.

Harcourt's scenario of the crime virus is not one that has spread to
intolerable limits only recently. It's vintage stuff and is now probably
both a continental and world-wide epidemic because of citizenship
complacency and defects in the law enforcement and judicial systems. From
my own past, I offer the following connections to today's Vancouver and
Okanagan situations.

In my earliest days as a reporter in the late 1950s covering police and
courts for the Detroit Times (now defunct), it was clear that most of the
crime and prostitution was generated by drug dependency. Even Martians
would have realized then that organized predators were creating miserable
lives for a hapless, poverty-ridden racial minority hooked on drugs.
Remember that Motown, eminently notorious even today, was once home to the
infamous, Depression-era Purple Gang-virtually the equal of Al Capone's
Chicago mob.

On to Winnipeg from 1976 to 1981, where a major pub was owned by a Kelowna
friend, who suffered his own dust-ups with biker-gang ruffians. Good thing
he had an emergency hot-line with area police, since they were trying to
transform his beverage room into a drug-trafficking station. Trapped alone
downstairs by three bikers one night, he cleverly duped them and dashed
quickly up stairs to the safety of a heavily-doored office. That mad dash
was made while the bikers eyed a lighted cigarette he had flicked above
their heads. On their way out, the trio ripped three pay phones off the walls.

In Guatemala in 1994, I interviewed an American woman whose husband had
been murdered five years earlier by Guatemalan soldiers suspected of having
been on the payroll of the U.S. CIA. They slashed his throat with a machete
and deposited the body beside a freeway near the backpacking farm owned by
he and his wife. My story of that interview appeared in an Okanagan
newspaper in 1994. Guatemala, significantly, is commonly known as a major
thoroughfare through which Colombian-bred drugs are flown into North
America. Colombian-made-in B.C.? Kelowna?

To think that only two years ago a retired Mountie I know lost his
bartender's job in a local pub immediately upon its acquisition by a biker
gang. H-m-m. And just this month, reviews in the National Post of two new
books detail the cancerous growth of organized crime: The Road to Hell: How
the Biker Gangs are Conquering Canada and The Natashas: The New Global Sex
Trade. The two authors of The Road to Hell contend that outlaw motorcycle
gangs have gained an upper hand largely because of the complacency of
police, politicians and honest citizens. The reviewer of The Natashas notes
that many of the traffickers in sexual bondage "live up to the stereotype
of lecherous mafiosi."

Meanwhile, my son, a former defence attorney and Crown prosecutor, shortly
will receive a teaching doctorate heavily laden with the historical
evolution of law, and I pray his future students can go out into a world
much freer of the criminal kingpins undermining Canada and the world.

And that would happen if all of us from soccer moms to corporate executives
got off our "buts" and into action on this issue. Buts such as "but it's
too costly," "but it's too hard", "but it's....this...or but it's that ..."
Responding to Harcourt's strong voice would be a tremendous start.

Wally Dennison

Kelowna