THE REAL COST OF THE 'WAR' ON DRUGS

Have you heard the news? Stephen Harper thinks he's Ronald Reagan.
"The Conservative government is set to launch a regressive war on
drugs," a Liberal press release says.

The war is scheduled to start this week, when the government releases
a new National Drug Strategy that will -- according to a report last
week -- get tough on drugs. More law enforcement. More treatment and
prevention. But less "harm reduction" -- including the end of support
for "Insite," Vancouver's safe-injection facility.

And so the lines have been drawn. On one side, those who say they are
defending the liberal Canadian approach against a Reagan-era war on
drugs. On the other, those who say the liberal Canadian approach
amounts to government aiding and abetting drug use and must be
replaced by a strong effort to stop use before it starts.

As emotionally satisfying as it would be to have a good bash at the
Tories, I'm afraid I can't. It's not that they're right. They're not.
Insite and other harm-reduction policies are supported by extensive
peer-reviewed research. The government's preferred package -- more
enforcement, tougher sentences, more treatment and prevention -- has
failed ever since Richard Nixon's White House first assembled it back
in the days when disco was cutting edge.

To anyone familiar with the history of drug policy, it is bleakly
funny to listen to the Tories enthusiastically repeat musty old
platitudes as if they were a brainstorm Stephen Harper had in the
shower this morning.

Nothing Surprising

But there's nothing surprising in this. Ignoring research, evidence
and logic is what the Tories do. So now they're going to do it some
more. Ho-hum.

More interesting are the fantasies on the other side. Take that
Liberal news release. "All the research suggests that an ideologically
motivated war on drugs is ineffective," it says, "while programs such
as the safe-injection site are producing positive results." It then
quotes Liberal health critic Bonnie Brown boasting that "the previous
Liberal government gave $500,000 a year to the safe-injection site."

Golly, what a humane, thoughtful bunch those Liberals are. They gave
$500,000 a year to Insite. And they are totally opposed to Harper's
stupid war on drugs. They've read the research. They know the score,
man.

But wait. I seem to recall something about how the Liberal government
budgeted money for drug policy. Oh yes. Back in 2001, Auditor General
Sheila Fraser released a report on that very subject.

Ms. Fraser discovered that the government didn't have any precise
goals it wanted to accomplish. And it didn't have any way of measuring
whether it was achieving those goals. And it didn't actually know how
much it was spending to achieve the goals it hadn't set and couldn't
measure.

So Ms. Fraser's staff put together some numbers and came up with an estimate
of how much the government was spending. Total: $500 million a year.

Ms. Fraser also had the novel idea that it would be good if we knew
what the money was actually being spent on. At the time, the Liberals
liked to say their government took a "balanced approach" on drugs --
which meant an equal focus on enforcement, treatment, prevention and
harm reduction -- but Ms. Fraser discovered that 90 per cent of the
$500 million a year went to enforcement alone. Sit on a stool balanced
like that and you're likely to get a concussion.

So let's do some cipherin'. On the whole drug file, the government
spent $500 million a year, with 90 per cent of that money going to
police and prisons. By my calculation -- and I admit I'm no math whiz
- -- the $500,000 a year the Liberals gave Insite was approximately
equal to the square root of one-half the Mounties' boot-polish budget.
Give or take a shine or two.

Only Federal Spending

Incidentally, these numbers account only for federal spending on drug
policy. Most prosecutions and incarcerations are paid for by the
provinces. A Senate committee estimated Canada's total annual spending
on drug policy was in the neighbourhood of $1 billion, with the vast
majority going to the Miami Vice side of things.

These numbers make it clear that Canada's gentler approach to drug
policy is a fairy tale told by the ignorant to the gullible. The core
drug policy of the last government involved arrests, punishments and
police boasts about record drug seizures that accomplish absolutely
nothing. It was the same policy as the government before it, and the
government before that one, and so on, in an unbroken chain of failure
and willful blindness stretching back nine decades to the introduction
of Prohibition. The conductors change but the dirge remains the same.

Don't get me wrong. I support harm-reduction programs. They save
lives. But despite all the attention they get, they have never been
anything more than earrings on an elephant.

If Stephen Harper scraps harm reduction, he will make it more likely
that some very weak people will die. He will shift the rhetoric. And
he'll save a few dollars he can use to pay for strip searches and
other things that excite conservatives.

But he won't be launching a war on drugs. That war began long, long
ago.