Pubdate: Wed, 22 Nov 2006 Source: Kamloops This Week (CN BC) Copyright: 2006 Kamloops This Week Contact: http://www.kamloopsthisweek.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/1271 Author: Tom Fletcher Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/decrim.htm (Decrim/Legalization) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction) Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?137 (Needle Exchange) WHAT WILL IT BE: LEGALIZATION, ALL-OUT WAR OR STATUS QUO? The 'Four Pillars' Free wine too? Last week's column touched on crime rates around the province, which the B.C. government tracks by health region. If you look at violent crime, serious property crime and non-cannabis drug crime, the safest place to live in B.C. is Vancouver Island. Next best is the Interior region, which encompasses the Kootenays, Okanagan and Cariboo. In the middle of the pack is the Fraser region, the largest in the province by population, extending from Burnaby through the Fraser Valley to Hope. Second-worst is the vast Northern region, which includes roughly the top two-thirds of the province. And the highest serious-crime rates are in Vancouver Coastal, which includes Vancouver, Richmond, the North Shore and Sunshine Coast. The good news is that the rate of serious crime has been going down in most parts of the province - the exception being the North, where serious crime went up by more than eight per cent from 2001 to 2004. The bad news, as I'm reminded by a new discussion paper just released by the B.C. Progress Board, is that, despite improvements in recent years, B.C. still ranks in the top third of Canadian provinces in all categories of major crime. We also have more property crime per capita than the neighbouring states of Washington and Oregon. The discussion paper, prepared by Simon Fraser University criminology professors Robert Gordon and Bryan Kinney, contains some provocative suggestions. When it comes to illegal drugs, for example, the professors conclude that B.C. has only three choices: 1) Lobby the federal government to legalize the drug trade, controlling it as tobacco and alcohol are regulated today. 2) Eliminate the organized criminal drug trade by way of a major expenditure in new police teams, legislation targeting money laundering and proceeds of crime, increased penalties and construction of new jails. 3) Combine options one and two, with a crackdown on organized crime followed by a phased-in decriminalization and legalization. Of course, the Conservative government in Ottawa will embrace legalization about the same time hell opens for public skating. Prime Minister Stephen Harper is reputed to be a libertarian at heart, but his justice and public safety posse, Vic Teows and Stockwell Day, are hang-'em high "social conservatives" who were appointed to play to the party's older support base, and would likely only support increased drug penalties. (As a small-L libertarian myself, I disagree with that approach, but it's preferable to the previous government, which repeatedly promised to decriminalize pot but never followed through, while opening its own low-grade grow-op in an abandoned mine.) The criminologists argue that legalizing drugs isn't likely to increase demand much more. If people want drugs in today's society, they will find a way to get them, or manufacture even worse substitutes like crystal meth. Nearly all street crime, the car and house break-ins that ordinary people are all too familiar with, is perpetrated in the pursuit of drugs. As for violent crime, if you take away the drug-related shootings and stabbings, you're left mainly with those crimes of passion that are themselves so often committed in a fog of intoxication. The report warns there is a fourth option, which is to maintain the status quo. For B.C., that means continuing to have Canada's most lenient courts, which combines with a relatively benign climate to make Lotus Land the destination of choice for Canada's sophisticated criminals. As things stand, B.C. currently has twice the rate of drug crime as any other province. And since legalization is currently not a viable option politically, the practical choice would be to increase sentences for major drug crime. The SFU report endorses what has become known as the "four pillars" approach to drugs, those pillars being education, treatment, enforcement and harm reduction. Regular readers will know what I think of pretend "needle exchange" programs, where dirty needles are thrown on the street, or unsafe "safe injection sites", where dirty street junk is injected with nursing supervision. The whole thing in Vancouver looks like a government agency set up to work in conjunction with the heroin and cocaine dealers who control the street outside. The prescription heroin trial that's currently going on in Vancouver offers more potential, at least for a few hardcore addicts who don't respond to methadone treatment. This type of program is the closest this country is going to get to legalization in the near future, and it can be done without the national and international political backlash that would kill a bolder program. Vancouver's drug-policy co-ordinator recently suggested a program to offer free daily rations of cheap red wine to hardcore alcoholics. The idea of this program would be to target those who will otherwise resort to drinking Lysol or shoe polish or whatever they can get, with predictable consequences for them and our idealistic socialized medical system that has to fix everyone, no matter what they choose to do to themselves. Personally, I could hold my nose and support such a plan, just like the prescription-heroin program. If we're going to have a victim culture where bad choices are treated as "diseases", with "society" and the "government" taking the place of individual responsibility, the nanny state might as well provide this welfare for the mind so working people can live in peace. - --- MAP posted-by: Beth Wehrman