HIGH TIME FOR CHANGE?

Prohibition Has Failed,Veterans Of Ongoing War Against Dope Use Claim

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 tomorrow, followed by a showing in Vancouver
on Sunday, before airing on Global 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.

About 330 of the organization's 7,000 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 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 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, Insite,
which provides a harm-reduction approach to treating people who may
otherwise overdose or pass on blood-borne diseases like HIV from
shared needles.

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.