JUST SAY NO TO RHETORIC

In remarks made at the White House this week, U.S. President George Bush
added more ammunition to the already armed-to-the-teeth, decades-old War on
Drugs.

"Drugs help supply the deadly work of terrorists," Dubya said. "Make no
mistake about it: If you're buying illegal drugs in America, it is likely
that money is going to end up in the hands of terrorist organizations."

Not that a tweaking, fix-hungry junkie cares a whit about where his/her
money ends up, be it Mustafa's Quik-Learn Flight School or Manuel Noriega's
legal defence fund.

And illegal drug consumers don't much care where their money comes from
either, be it your stolen TV set or the desperate exchange of their own
bruised flesh for cash.

Addiction's funny that way. The drug becomes the only thing that matters.
What's not amusing is the beefy, stamp-out-evil approach to substance abuse
that continues to dominate policy on both sides of the border.

The "terrorists profit" theme that Bush used to announce his
administration's new anti-drug initiatives - $19-billion worth through 2003
- - was echoed in slick ads broadcast during the Super Bowl, that bastion of
brawn-fuelled bravado.

In B.C., elite police "Green Teams" bust marijuana grow-ops in a
Canadian-style display of getting tough on drugs.

Yet despite the confiscation of vast quantities of the so-called "gateway"
drug, the narcotics market is thriving.

Drug abusers continue to line the courthouses, fill hospital ER beds and
cost taxpayers incalculable amounts of money in piece-meal "treatment."

Down south, where there exists a greater divide between the haves and the
have-nots, the 'hoods and haute couture, it's even easier to reduce the
complexity of addiction to a stand-off between "us" and "them."

Bush boils his strategy down to a form of over-simplified social economics
not seen since the Reagan years and Nancy's asinine Just Say No anti-drug
campaign, which she announced with a flurry of red, white and blue balloons
on the manicured White House lawn.

"Ours is a concerted effort to reduce demand," Bush said Tuesday, aiming to
cut drug use by 25 per cent within five years. "As demand goes down, so
will supply."

No word on how to reduce that demand, how to take the aching hopelessness
out of poverty, how to inject positive mentors into neighbourhoods teeming
with gangs yet devoid of fathers, how to move the disenfranchised into the
main.

No words, in fact, except the rhetoric.

As long as we continue to "fight" the "war" on drugs, rather than treat
substance abuse as the health care issue it is, addicts will remain the
enemy instead of who they really are. Our neighbours, co-workers, family
and friends.