CANADIAN, AMERICAN COPS SAY IT'S TIME TO END DRUG PROHIBITION, SAVE LIVES

VANCOUVER - It's a familiar scene on TV newscasts: wads of cash, rows
of guns and bags full of drugs displayed neatly on a table by police
officers seemingly posing by their latest set of trophies.

One more drug bust, another haul, and big-time traffickers facing the
prospect of hefty jail time.

But some former law enforcement officials in Canada and the United
States who have spent years fighting the ongoing war on drugs say
it's a losing battle.

Their views about how prohibition has failed to make a dent in the
drug supply while millions of dollars continue to be wasted on
criminalizing recreational drug users are told in the National Film
Board documentary Damage Done: The Drug War Odyssey.

It premiers in Victoria on Saturday, followed by a showing in
Vancouver on Sunday before airing on TV on April 28.

Most of the police officers featured in the film are part of a
growing U.S.-based organization called LEAP - Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition - which also includes corrections officers, retired and
sitting judges and prosecutors.

Mike Smithson, a spokesman for LEAP, said from Medford, Mass., that
about 330 of the organization's 7,000 international members are Canadians.

They include Senator Larry Campbell, a former RCMP drug squad officer
and Vancouver mayor who ran on a platform of reducing harm from drug use.

Campbell, whose views are featured in the film, said in an interview
that drug laws need to be reformed so addiction is treated as a
health issue that's exacerbated by other problems including poverty,
homelessness and mental illness.

He said his law-and-order stance about criminalizing junkies as a
Mountie changed radically when he became Vancouver's chief coroner in
1996 and saw the devastating effects of drug overdoses in the city's
seedy Downtown Eastside.

"My philosophy had to shift because I went from enforcing the law to
trying to save people's lives," said Campbell, who will speak at the
Vancouver premiere of the film on Sunday.

"When I really took a hard look at it, I realized that what we were
doing was not saving lives. In fact, we were seeing the deaths increase."

Campbell is a proponent of Vancouver's safe-injection site, which
provides a harm-reduction approach to treating people who may
otherwise overdose or pass on blood-borne diseases like HIV from
shared needles.

At Insite, the only such facility in North America, addicts shoot up
heroin in the presence of a nurse and are offered referrals for treatment.

Campbell noted that various studies published in top international
journals such as the Lancet, the British Medical Journal and the New
England Journal of Medicine have hailed the positive effects of
Insite, including reduced property crime by people desperate for a fix.

The facility is operating as a pilot project until the end of the
year, when the Conservative government is expected to decide its fate.