APPLY ANTI-TOBACCO GAINS TO OTHER DRUGS

What if we treated other problem drugs like tobacco?

The province's latest move to ban smoking in enclosed public spaces was a
reminder of how successful we've been in dealing with tobacco use.

Watch an old movie and everybody is smoking. Even 20 years ago, people
smoked at work, in bars. The people who asked for the non-smoking rooms in
hotels were kind of weird and often disappointed.

Smoking was still cool and socially acceptable.

But we decided smoking was bad - addictive, gives you cancer and a brace of
other illnesses.

Taxes made it more and more expensive, until it got hard to deny you were
hooked. Not many people would happily spend $60 a week unless there was
addiction involved.

Life insurance began to cost more. You couldn't smoke at work. Restaurant
smoking areas kept shrinking. People started to talk more and more about
the fact that 40 per cent of hospitalizations are smoking-related.

And then, finally, there was another big shift. Smoking became largely a
mark of loserdom. Not entirely - tautly wounded artists and blues
performers still get away with it. But broadly, smokers are people you
would be less likely to hire.

In a relatively short time, we took a deadly drug that was almost
completely accepted, used by a majority of adults and highly addictive, and
slashed its use.

We could have made tobacco illegal, like drugs, 20 years ago. But we chose
a different approach - managed use, with education and financial penalties
to decrease smoking.

And it's worked quite well.

So why not try the same approach with drugs, or at least some of them?

What if we say heroin and cocaine are like tobacco - things we really wish
people wouldn't use, but that we still accept some probably will.

Under that approach we would commit a lot of resources to making sure
people didn't start, as we did with smoking. We'd target kids, but also
vulnerable adults.

We'd make a big effort to help people quit.

And for people who wanted to keep using, we would prescribe heroin or
cocaine or working substitutes they could pick up at a clinic. (The current
half-hearted, restrictive methadone program really doesn't count.)

What are the downsides? It feels wrong to provide a drug like cocaine to
people, for one thing. You could argue that others - young people - might
see the practice as condoning drug use. (Though we've managed to allow
controlled sale of tobacco products while condemning its use.)

Against those are negatives, look at what we would gain.

The people being prescribed drugs wouldn't have to stealing to get the
money to buy them. Police estimate up to 90-per-cent of break-ins and
thefts are drug-related.

Organized criminals would lose a huge market. There would still be demand,
but not enough to make the business so attractive.

Instead of spending their days and nights scrambling for money and drugs,
users would have time to think about work and developing more stable lives.

Based on similar efforts in other countries, a significant number would
seek treatment. During a prescribed heroin trial in Switzerland, not only
did crime by users plummet but about seven per cent quit during their time
in the program.

Since people wouldn't be using in alleys and dodgey settings, we'd save a
fortune in health costs.

People with both mental health problems and addictions would get a chance
to reduce the chaos their lives and deal with their mental illness.

And all the while we'd follow the path set by the anti-smoking campaign.

About 55 per cent of adults smoked in 1965, compaed witrh 15 per cent in
B.C. today. Only about two per cent of Canadians are heroin and cocaine
users. If we could make the same relative gains, the number of addicts
would be tiny.

That's a long list of benefits, with few costs.

Yet we push on with tactics and strategies that have failed to deal with
prohibited substances for almost a century. We fight to reduce supply,
unsuccessfully, and create crime and chaos and costs.

For whatever reason, we tried something different with tobacco. Maybe the
big companies had too much clout for prohibition to be tried, or there were
just too many smokers. But we didn't ban cigarettes or arrest people. We
worked on reducing demand.

And it worked. Why not for other drugs?