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T HE VA N C O U V E R C O U R I E R F R I D AY, JULY 2 , 2 0 1 0
opinion
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Government addicted to ‘war on drugs’
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WEB POLL NATION Go to www.vancourier.com to vote Should Canada’s military role in Afghanistan continue beyond 2011? Last week’s poll question: Where will you take your summer holiday? At the beach or campground: 25 per cent In a foreign country: 13 per cent What summer holiday? 62 per cent This is not a scientific poll.
Addiction is a terrible thing. When the addiction is to alcohol, hard drugs, over-eating or gambling, it can rage through the addict’s physical and financial health like a forest fire, leaving lives in charred ruins. But equally destructive is government addiction to a ham-handed law and order response to drug use, the much vaunted “war on drugs” approach that has failed so spectacularly around the world over the last century. Cloaked in self-congratulatory moralism and driving billions of dollars in wasted public investment in counterproductive enforcement and prisons, the simple minded “just say no to drugs” approach popularized by that great public intellectual Nancy Reagan and now espoused by the Harper government, has had many decades to succeed if it ever was going to do so. The results of that tragic experiment with the lives of North Americans are in, and they are overwhelmingly bad. Criminalizing the use of some addictive substances and not others—jailing junkies and leaving those who swill Scotch alone, for example—makes no sense, and the historical record makes it absolutely clear that prohibition creates and empowers organized crime groups, and gangs that then settle their business disputes with automatic weapons, as witness the Lower Mainland’s spate of drug gang-related shootings over the past few years and the carnage being wreaked currently on Mexican civil society as drug cartels shoot it out in border town streets. The Harper government’s latest move in its long-standing attempts to be consistently on the wrong side of science and sanity in these
tomsandborn matters has been to take an appeal to the Supreme Court last week. They are trying to close down Vancouver’s pioneering supervised injection site (Insite) by appealing a ruling at the B.C. Court of Appeal that held the site has a constitutionally justified right to exist. This is a shameful waste of taxpayer money and a threat to a facility that saves lives and, ironically enough, given the nature of the wrong headed criticism it has to endure, often puts addicts on the road to recovery. A statement issued this week by the International AIDS Society, the International Society for Science in Drug Policy and the B.C. Centre for Excellence is a useful contribution to sane public discussion on drugs and drug policy. The Vienna Declaration, launched for public discussion June 28, will be the official statement of the upcoming AIDS 2010 conference to be held in Austria in July.
The declaration reads, in part: “The criminalisation of illicit drug users is fuelling the HIV epidemic and has resulted in overwhelmingly negative health and social consequences. A full policy reorientation is needed.” AIDS 2010 chair Dr. Julio Montaner, president of the IAS and director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence, says in a press release promoting the Vienna Declaration, “As scientists, we are committed to raising our collective voice to promote evidence-based approaches to illicit drug policy that start by recognizing that addiction is a medical condition, not a crime.” Citizens of Vancouver should not leave the debate to the beleaguered scientists and the self-serving politicians. We should all speak out in favour of science-based drug policies, an end to prohibition and increases in harm reduction services in our city. A useful first step that is, unlike the Ottawasourced madness of the latest attempt to kill the supervised injection site, within the power of Vancouver politicians, has been suggested by the local Beyond Prohibition Foundation. The folks at the foundation want the Vancouver Police Department to be instructed that arresting pot smokers who possess personal use quantities of the herb is a very low priority for enforcement activities. This is only a modest step, and in my view could usefully be extended to include personal use quantities of all illegal drugs, but it would be a step in the right direction. That in itself would be an intoxicating relief. tos@infinet.net
ORGANIZE A COMMUNITY PAINT-OUT TODAY! Residents, businesses, schools, community centres – take charge of your neighbourhood, and remove graffiti by organizing a paint-out.
We will team up with you by providing all the paint and equipment you need for a successful paint-out. So get started, and spread the paint. Contact Brian at 604.873.7793.
To report graffiti call our Graffiti Hotline at 604.873.7161. (Frequent callers can skip the introductory message by pressing #.)