Pubdate: Wed, 06 Feb 2008 Source: Province, The (CN BC) Copyright: 2008 The Province Contact: http://www.canada.com/theprovince/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476 Author: Suzanne Fournier Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/hr.htm (Harm Reduction) WE CAN'T WIN DRUG WAR WITH JUST POLICE: FORUM Delegates Work To Revise UN Drug Policy A United Nations forum on drug policy yesterday agreed that "over-reliance on law enforcement" causes deaths, fuels crime and unfairly targets "poor people of colour." Former Vancouver mayor Philip Owen said after the Beyond 2008 conference in Vancouver that "drug-policy reform won the day because most rational people on the front lines realize that the war on drugs has been a miserable failure." The conference drew about 80 delegates from all over North America and is one of several being held worldwide before a drug-policy discussion slated for Vienna this July. Owen, the architect of Vancouver's four-pillar drug strategy based on prevention, treatment, harm reduction and enforcement, noted that the "old-school prohibition crowd also had its say." "There are still those, in the U.S. and in our federal government, who say drug users are criminals and should get a job, pay taxes and salute the flag," he said. He insisted that community attitudes are dramatically shifting. He noted that 220 U.S. mayors at a conference last June "agreed unanimously the war on drugs is not working." "Mayors are close to the issue so they actually see the drug users as people who are ill and need treatment, and they have to deal with related crime, yet it's our federal government that controls narcotics," Owen said. He blasted Ottawa for "spending $64 million spread over two years for every province in Canada for prevention, treatment and enforcement of drug policy -- which is just insulting. It's just pennies." He noted there are 45,000 deaths each year in Canada linked to alcohol and tobacco, which are legal. "How many die of marijuana? None," he said. "If government regulated and taxed marijuana and other drugs, then we'd at least get money for health and social programs, including drug treatment, detox and prevention." Forum organizers noted that "over-reliance on law enforcement" criminalizes drug users unnecessarily, "fuels the drug economy and the black market, aids organized crime and terrorists [dependent on income from drug crops] and disproportionately targets poor people of colour." Forum co-sponsor Gillian Maxwell of Keeping the Door Open: Dialogues on Drug Use, said most conference delegates who visited Insite, Vancouver's safe-injection site, "were very positive." Chris Livingstone of the Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society agreed with forum findings that "First Nations people suffer disproportionate harm." "All of the punishment and prohibition policies lead to criminalization and deaths -- we can't get any funding to continue our alley patrols where we saved people from overdose deaths." - --- MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom