Pubdate: Thu, 12 Jan 2017
Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC)
Copyright: 2017 Postmedia Network Inc.
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477
Author: Pete McMartin
Page: A5

FORMER B.C. PREMIER RELUCTANTLY OPTS FOR LEGALIZATION OF DRUGS

Long, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the B.C. political
landscape, Mike Harcourt was a fresh-faced criminal defence lawyer. His
anti-freeway crusade, his Vancouver mayoralty and his premiership were all
still before him. He had yet to fall from his cottage deck.

He saw some pitiful things as a lawyer in the courtroom days - mostly,
they were his clients.

"Some of them, like George, a really lousy crook, suffered from what we
called 'wilful blindness'. Didn't remember robbing a bank, with his
fingers in his pocket pretending it was a gun, when six video cameras and
seven witnesses, including the teller, did remember. Ran to his getaway
car but he'd locked himself out. Police arrived to see him trying to bust
into his old jalopy," Harcourt recalled.

Harcourt sees too much of it being played out on the streets with
fentanyl. Unlike most of us, Harcourt has had a unique and ongoing vantage
point of the long progression of drug abuse the public never had - from
law, from the Mayor's chair and chair of the police board, from the very
highest political office in the province. During that progression,
Harcourt's views on drugs have evolved to a place to where many have yet
to go. He thinks they should be legalized.

"My thinking was that in the 1960s, '70s and '80s the drug policies we had
certainly weren't working, but that's when you had the full-throated war
on drugs happening, and I was watching these pretty sad-soul clients of
mine troop before the courts and go off to jail with very few treatment
programs around. They (the police) would get the low-lying fruit, the
street dealers, but not usually nabbing the big guys at the top of the
pyramid of the drug trade. So I saw what we were doing was not going
anywhere, but there was no appetite (to consider legalization) and
certainly it was political suicide to talk about legalizing all drugs."

Harcourt himself has been touched by the drug epidemic: His home was
broken into three times despite an alarm system - on one occasion with the
police finding heroin residue on the blanket the thief had used to muffle
the breaking of an upstairs bedroom window.

"I think (the public conversation) has changed because it's sunk in that
it's not working and that there's a lot of waste. I think a lot of people
are seeing now what a disaster it's been. That's obvious, but what do you
do about it?"

Harcourt chose legalization. He did so reluctantly.

"When we talk (about legalization), realize I'm not enthusiastically
advocating legalizing drugs. I hate anybody being addicted/ enslaved to
booze, cigarettes, legal or illegal pharmaceuticals. However, in public
policy, choices a lot of the time aren't between good, better and best.
They're usually between bad, worse and sh-tiest. So choosing between the
failed war on drugs of the last 80 years, or doing nothing and watching
thousands die from fentanyl, or worse, laced heroin, cocaine or other
drugs, then trying to regulate drug usage - like Portugal is doing, or
Canada and Ecuador is doing with marijuana, leading towards moderate usage
or abstinence - seems the best of a bad lot of choices. For example,
Switzerland has a program for long-term heroin addicts of heroin
maintenance leading to abstinence. The program has a 71 per cent success
rate. The personal, family and societal damage done by intemperate drug
usage is huge. So it's irresponsible to not try to deal with thi! s area
of human misbehaviour."

Morally, Harcourt finds himself conflicted by legalization. In the case of
a deadly drug like fentanyl, he wonders how anyone could be so reckless as
to risk their lives so easily. It offends the sane person's sense of
responsibility. It gives rise to a sense of just desserts, or as Harcourt
characterized that thinking, "Well, you had a choice, and if you chose to
kill yourself, tough luck."

"I have a sort of ambivalence about it," Harcourt said. "It's a moral
dilemma because people are making these choices. But ..." But people will
die. But we will be implicitly condoning their deaths.

But we don't think that way for those afflicted with alcoholism, and we do
all in our power as a society to convince smokers to stop smoking, and we
have begun to campaign against the ruinous and addictive qualities of
sugar - drugs that are legal and that take as great, if not greater, a
toll on the public's health than drug addiction.

But when has logic ever entered our thinking about drugs?
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