Pubdate: Wed, 27 Apr 2016
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2016 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Pete McMartin
Page: A1

DECRIMINALIZATION MOVES AT SLOTH SPEED

This stupid, hypocritical war on drugs is in its long, slow retreat

The United Nations General Assembly special session on drugs took 
place in New York last week, and the UN, as it has so many times 
before, reached a consensus as to what it would do to counteract the 
world's drug problem: Nothing.

"It was a wash," said Donald MacPherson, executive director of SFU's 
Canadian Drug Policy Coalition, who attended the three-day session. 
"There was serious resistance to any kind of drug policy reform 
initiatives from Asian countries and China and Russia. So (the UN's) 
consensus-based model is not where change will happen. Even the 
legalization of cannabis in some American states was not talked about 
there. So things that were actually happening in the world were not discussed."

Much was hoped for going into the special session. The last UN 
session on drugs took place in 1998, which convened under the chipper 
motto of "A Drug-Free World - We Can Do It!" The policy paper that 
came out of that endorsed the status quo of enforcement and 
incarceration (and in countries like Indonesia, China and Iran, the 
death penalty), and proposed the get-tough approach would free the 
world of the drug scourge by 2008.

Need I state the obvious?

The war on drugs continued, to the benefit only of rogue states, drug 
cartels and police unions. Drug use continued to rise worldwide, and 
small-time criminalized users suffered needless death, infection and 
incarceration. Not only have the illegal status of drugs destabilized 
Vancouver and Surrey neighbourhoods, they've destabilized entire 
nations. Case in point: This year's special session was scheduled for 
2019, but the presidents of Mexico, Guatemala and Colombia called for 
the session to be held early because the drug situation in their 
countries is so dire. They want a new global policy now.

They won't be getting it from the UN. Instead, it will come piecemeal 
from different countries around the world. In 2001, Portugal became 
the first European state to decriminalize all drugs. The Czech 
Republic followed suit in 2010 by decriminalizing the personal use of 
drugs in small amounts, to the point of setting how large those 
amounts could be (for example, no more than 1.5 grams of heroin, or 
four tablets of ecstasy). In 2014, Uruguay was the first country in 
the world to legalize cannabis. In the U.S., four states plus 
Washington, D.C., legalized cannabis, while 16 other states have 
decriminalized its use. Here in Canada, the federal government has 
announced its intent to legalize cannabis in 2017, and Health 
Minister Jane Philpott reiterated that promise at the UN session.

To MacPherson, these are all hopeful signs that at least some parts 
of the world are taking a more rational approach to drug control. In 
2013, he co-authored the coalition's report Getting to Tomorrow: A 
Report on Canadian Drug Policy, which called for the 
decriminalization of both hard and soft drugs. (The report was just 
updated in a hardcover edition entitled More Harm Than Good: Drug 
Policy in Canada.)

In that year, the government and opposition parties rejected the 
proposal to decriminalize hard drugs like heroin and cocaine. But 
that was then, and in the intervening years the Conservatives' 
get-tough moralizing was rejected by the voting public and, in a 
series of decisions, the Supreme Court. The country moved not just to 
a Liberal government but toward the liberal idea that drugs are a 
health problem and not a crime problem.

"The most important thing we can learn from a decision like that of 
Portugal's," MacPherson said, "is that the sky didn't fall. Nothing 
bad happened. People thought there would be drug tourists coming, and 
there would be this and there would be that. But things are getting 
better ... They've seen a reduction across a number of metrics, 
including overdoses, substance use itself, HIV-related (infection), etc."

Decriminalization isn't a cure-all to drug problems, MacPherson 
admitted. No policy is perfect. The spate of deaths from fentanyl, 
for example, suggests we need a further conversation on the state 
control and sale of opioids or some other drug people want to ingest 
for recreational use, if only as an alternative to unregulated and 
potentially lethal drugs being bought on the streets. And that will 
be a tough conversation to have.

But this much is clear: This stupid, hypocritical and invasive war on 
drugs is in its long, slow retreat. The UN may be immobilized in the 
face of it, and, if Canada remains true to form, nothing substantial 
will change here until more forward-thinking jurisdictions show us the way.

But sooner or later, we'll decriminalize drugs, both hard and soft.

Why not sooner?
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom