DRUG WAR A LOSING BATTLE, FILM FINDS

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 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.

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
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.