WRONG ON DRUGS

SPENDING more money on the treatment of drug addicts is perhaps a
useful thing, even though it is hardly ever successful. Treatment
centres at least offer a hope of rehabilitation to drug users.

Spending more money on educating people about the dangers of drug use
is certainly more useful. Although its effectiveness is hard to
measure -- it is difficult to gauge how many people are not doing
something because of a newspaper article or advertisement they once
read -- the decline in the number of cigarette smokers in the last 40
years is a clear indication that continuing, relentless education
about the dangers of drug use can work.

What doesn't work is spending more and more money on enforcing
Canada's antiquated drug laws. What is not useful is abandoning the
few harm-reduction programs aimed at reducing the likelihood that
intravenous drug use will lead to serious -- and costly -- diseases
such as HIV, AIDS and hepatitis that can be contracted through dirty
needles. What is pointless are drug treatment courts that order
addicts into treatment programs as an alternative to jail -- when
voluntary treatment has a failure rate of over 90 per cent, forced
treatment seems a waste of time and money. It is almost as great a
waste of time and money as jailing drug users, whose only fault is
their addiction and whose only crimes, usually, are associated with
feeding that addiction.

The federal government is about to embark on an exactly backwards
battle plan in the war on drugs. The budget brought down in March
allocates $64 million for this war, some of it to be spent on
treatment and prevention, but most of it destined to be allocated to
enforcing the anti-drug laws.

There is ultimately no greater waste of taxpayers' money than this.
Customs officers and narcotics police freely admit that they can
intercept only a small fraction of the illegal drugs imported into
Canada or manufactured and sold here. Despite the hundreds of millions
of dollars spent every year on this, there is no shortage of dope on
the streets.

Until the nation is ready to treat drug abuse as the social and health
problem that it is -- similar to the way it treats the abuse of
alcohol and tobacco -- rather than as a crime, government funds are
better spent on education aimed at dissuading people from beginning to
use drugs and on harm reduction programs, which minimize the cost of
drug use to the health care and social welfare systems. Treating drug
use as a crime breeds crime and feeds crime and serves only to provide
a lucrative income for the criminal gangs that infest the nation's
cities.