Pubdate: Wed, 22 Jul 2020 Source: National Post (Canada) Copyright: 2020 Canwest Publishing Inc. Contact: http://drugsense.org/url/wEtbT4yU Website: http://www.nationalpost.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/286 NATIONAL POST VIEW: LISTEN TO THE POLICE Listen to the police Let's talk about decriminalizing all drugs We're having a national conversation about policing and criminal justice. Examining our drug laws is a natural extension of this debate More than nine years ago, writing about the war on drugs, this editorial board encouraged the government of then-prime minister Stephen Harper to get bolder with decriminalizing cannabis. "By any reasonably broad metric," we wrote then, the war on drugs "has been an abysmal failure. According to estimates by the UN - by no means a liberal organization when it comes to drug policy - worldwide consumption of opiates rose 34.5 per cent from 1998 to 2008, cocaine by 27 per cent, and cannabis by 8.5 per cent. In achieving that abject failure, tens of thousands of people have been killed." In the years since, the numbers have remained generally the same - the UN reported just last month that between 2009 and 2018, the number of people using drugs (including cannabis) had grown by another 30 per cent. Still, some change has come. Four years after we wrote the words above, the Trudeau government was elected, and it delivered an important step - the legalization of cannabis. The sky has not fallen. To the extent the world has ended, it's been brought low by plague, not pot - indeed, as noted last week in this space, the Ontario government reacted in part to the pandemic by making it easier for Ontarians to order legal pot for home delivery. Flatten the curve while getting high. Canada's legalization of cannabis seems like a massive societal shift, compared to where we were nine years ago, but the actual legalization of marijuana was accomplished reasonably smoothly. It was almost an anti-climax. With that in mind, it's now time to carefully and responsibly consider another major shift: decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of more, perhaps even all, drugs. The Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police (CACP) made headlines recently when it recommended exactly that, specifically, decriminalizing the possession of small amounts of illegal narcotics for personal use. It is not the first time this idea has been brought up in Canada, and it likely won't be the last (Bonnie Henry, B.C.'s public health leader, recommended it just this week). But it's worth considering - especially now. Calls to decriminalize drugs had come from both public health experts and politicians in recent years, before the pandemic hit. In 2018, Toronto Public Health released a report calling on the city to lobby the federal government to decriminalize drugs, which was also endorsed by Montreal's health agency. It was also in the Green party's 2019 election platform (for whatever that's worth). While these groups were largely ignored by the federal government, it is noteworthy that the call to action from police comes from an organization that actually represents the men and women charged with running our law enforcement agencies. "Arresting individuals for simple possession for illegal drugs is ineffective and doesn't save lives," said the CACP's president, Chief Const. Adam Palmer. "We recommend that enforcement for possession give way to an integrated health-focused approach that requires partnerships between police, health care and all levels of government." Sound familiar? We have been having a national conversation about whether some situations should be handled by mental health experts, rather than police, and about the racial inequities in our criminal justice system. Examining our drug laws is a natural extension of this debate because for far too long, we have treated drug abuse as a criminal matter, rather than largely a public health issue. And there is little doubt that the War on Drugs has disproportionately affected minorities. While most Canadian police forces don't keep data on race, we know that Aboriginal and Black people are over-represented in our prison system. (A 2013 investigation by the ombudsman for federal offenders found that Black people made up 9.5 per cent of the prison population, despite accounting for less than three per cent of the total population, while Indigenous people comprised 23 per cent of prisoners, despite representing just over four per cent of Canada as a whole.) There have also been numerous studies showing that drug laws, particularly when cannabis was still criminalized, disproportionately hurt Blacks and Aboriginals. This, indeed, was one of the arguments cited by the Liberals as favouring legalization. They were right. It is time this country took a hard look at our drug laws in order to figure out what makes sense, and what doesn't. Legalizing marijuana was a good first step in acknowledging that not all drugs are created equal and that many of the drug-related problems we have in this country stem from the organized criminals who sell them, not the people who use them. But the conversation can't end there, because we still have a system that spends far too many resources punishing those who use drugs, rather than trying to help people with addiction issues and focusing police resources on what really matters: keeping organized crime out and the public safe. It's time for our government, and Canadians generally, to have this conversation. We are well aware of the devastating impact drugs can have on individuals, on families and on communities. But it's equally clear that responding with law enforcement and little else isn't making these problems better - if anything, over-policing is making them worse. We can do better than this. Or, to quote again from our editorial nine years ago, "There can be no worse outcome than utter failure." Indeed. - --- MAP posted-by: Matt