Pubdate: Sun, 04 Dec 2011
Source: Victoria Times-Colonist (CN BC)
Copyright: 2011 Times Colonist
Contact: http://www2.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/letters.html
Website: http://www.timescolonist.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/481
Author: William Johnson
Note: Veteran journalist William Johnson is the author of Stephen 
Harper and the Future of Canada. He wrote this for the Ottawa Citizen.

IT'S TIME TO END THE PHONEY WAR ON DRUGS

Punitive Approach to Legislation Is Just Making the Problem Worse

We are supposedly engaged in a "war on drugs." What war on drugs? 
It's a war on people - the young, the uneducated and the aboriginals. 
A phoney war, because it provokes that which it proclaims to repress.

Take three countries with different approaches to recreational drugs: 
the United States, Canada and the Netherlands. The first two rely on 
a punitive approach. The Netherlands prefers harm reduction. As is 
notorious, Dutch citizens can openly enjoy cannabis in coffee shops.

So does the Netherlands swarm with drug-crazed zombies? Do the Dutch 
die in droves from overdose? Find the answer in World Drug Report 
2011, published by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime.

Here's the rate of deaths where drugs were the primary cause, per 
million of population aged between 15 and 64. In the U.S., most 
punitive, 182.4 died. In Canada, less punitive: 93.4. In the 
Netherlands, most permissive: 11.6. So for every Dutch death caused 
by drugs, eight Canadians and 15.7 Americans died. Our penal laws are 
gifts to embalmers.

Another statistic: the UNODC's "best estimate" of the percentage of 
the population (15 to 64) who use cannabis annually. In the U.S., 
13.7 per cent. In Canada, 12.6 per cent. In the Netherlands: 5.4 per 
cent. For every Dutch pot smoker, there are 2.3 Canadians and 2.5 Americans.

Cannabis accounts for 70 per cent of all recorded drug offences. But 
cocaine is more harmful. In the U.S., 2.4 per cent take cocaine. In 
Canada, 1.4 per cent. In the Netherlands, 0.6 per cent. So four 
Americans use cocaine for every Dutch user.

The American-Canadian approach is ineffective and hypocritical. Have 
we not learned the lesson of the destructive U.S. prohibition against 
alcohol, its reign of crime and killing? The more repressive the 
prohibition, the higher the price of the drug, so the more attractive 
to organized crime. Crime bosses recruit poor saps who sell the drugs 
on the street. Those who get arrested are easily replaced.

Who uses cannabis, the most popular illegal drug? The World Drug 
Report 2011 presents a profile of U.S. users who obtained treatment 
between 2000 and 2008. More than half - 57.1 per cent - had been 
referred for treatment by the criminal justice system.

One third were less than 17 years old, another third were 18 to 24. 
Only 34.9 per cent were over 25 years of age. They were young and 
under-educated: only 9.6 per cent had studied beyond high school 
while 90.4 per cent had 12 years of schooling or less. Only 19.2 per 
cent held full-time jobs.

These characteristics - young, under-educated, not employed - target 
one category of Canadian citizens: aboriginals. A Statistics Canada 
study titled Victimization and offending among the Aboriginal 
population of Canada, by Jodi-Anne Brzozowski, Andrea Taylor-Butts 
and Sara Johnson, lists the factors linked with criminal offences.

"Some of these factors, which are all more common among the 
aboriginal population, include being young, having low educational 
attainment, being unemployed, having low income, being a member of a 
loneparent family, living in crowded conditions, and having high 
residential mobility," the report says.

If prison solved problems rooted in social and cultural dysfunctions, 
then Nunavut and the Northwest Territories would be model 
communities. On March 3, Carleton University professor Ian Lee 
provided a Commons committee with hard data that should provoke 
second thoughts. It is reproduced in the Macdonald Laurier 
Institute's March publication, Myths and Urban Legends Concerning 
Crime in Canada.

Based on Statistics Canada data for 2008, Lee showed how crime varied 
by province. Ontario reported 4,879 crimes per 100,000 of population, 
Quebec 5,065. But Manitoba reported 9,911 - twice the Ontario rate; 
Saskatchewan 12,892, four times; Yukon 21,805, five times; Nunavut 
34,867, seven times and Northwest Territories 43,509 - nine times 
Ontario's rate.

Does building more prisons remedy these diverse situations? Lee gives 
incarceration rates for 2008.

Nova Scotia had the lowest at 59 per 100,000. Newfoundland followed 
with 68, then Quebec at 72 and Ontario at 87. But the rate in 
Manitoba was 177, in Saskatchewan 187, in Yukon 303, in Nunavut 684 
and in the Northwest Territories 843.

The people incarcerated in the Northwest Territories were 14 times 
the proportion in Nova Scotia. Clearly, aboriginal communities have a 
serious specific problem of criminality. More and longer 
imprisonments, as proposed by the Harper government's Safe Streets 
and Communities Act, just don't make sense.

Rampant crime in aboriginal communities results from a snake pit of 
intertwined social and cultural legacies. And "substance abuse," 
whether the drug be legal like alcohol or illegal like pot, is a 
common denominator. The "Victimization" study cited above noted: 
"Substance abuse was assessed to be at a medium or high level for a 
majority of adults involved in correctional services, but was 
particularly prevalent among aboriginal persons. Specifically, more 
than nine in 10 had a substance abuse need compared to seven in 10 
non-aboriginal adults."

The hammer-and-sickle approach of creating concentration camps for 
recreational drug users will provide neither safe communities nor 
safe streets. An intelligent democracy, an intelligent government, 
transfers those billions towards targeted communities to reach the 
root of their dysfunctions.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom