I have always been a huge advocate of legalizing marijuana, but I am now starting to wonder if we would not be better off legalizing other drugs as well.
This week Yorkton police wrapped up a five-month, multi-agency operation to clean up a ring of dope dealers in the Yorkton area. What is really discouraging is that the 21 people arrested over the past three months are barely the tip of the iceberg.
Sgt. James Morton, of the RCMP's General Investigations Section, said as effective as the sting was, they have not solved Yorkton's cocaine problem "by any stretch of the imagination."
He said as long as there is demand, there will be those who are willing to provide the supply.
This is something we all know. It's how any business works. Unfortunately, in the case of drug trafficking, the costs are paid by society at large and I am quickly coming to the conclusion those costs are way too high.
In December, a 33-year-old mother of four children aged five months to 16 years was gunned down, in her Saskatoon home, the victim of a case of mistaken address.
This is becoming far too common a story. A week barely seems to go by without stories of shootings coming out of our big cities and it is spilling into our smaller cities too.
It's not only criminals hurting each other.
And sometimes it is unintended harm from tainted drugs or unusually high purity of the product.
That's the problem, it's not simply the crimes of selling and consuming these substances, it is all the related violence, property crime and other harm to innocent people and addicts for whom we should have compassion, not contempt.
And, although there aren't yet all-out gang wars happening in Yorkton, Morton fears it is not unrealistic to think it's only a matter of time.
Then there is all the public money that's tied up in policing, justice and corrections, money that could be better spent on public education and addictions services.
I say that because people are going to do these things regardless of whether they are legal or not. Yorkton police officers are out there every day facing danger in what basically amounts to putting a bandage on an open wound.
Of course, it is an exceptionally difficult discussion to have. While a majority of Canadians support the legalization of pot, polls show less than 10 per cent would consider a similar treatment of coke, heroin, ecstasy and methamphetamine.
These drugs, it seems, carry a moral stigma that makes it hard for the mainstream population to entertain thoughts of legalization.
But why? The wholesale failure of alcohol prohibition should give us a clue that more harm than good comes from criminalizing behaviour that people are going to engage in anyway.
People don't abstain from drugs because they're illegal. And they don't abstain from drugs because they're not healthy. Our experience with alcohol and tobacco prove that addiction is more powerful than the Criminal Code.
How do addicts who need or want help get it when there is not only the moral stigma, but also legal implications?
Then there's the question of normalization. The argument goes that without the moral stigma and criminal ramifications of drug use the problem will get worse.
What little evidence exists, however, suggests that is not true.
In 2001, Portugal abolished all criminal penalties for illicit drugs including marijuana, cocaine and heroin. Five years later a Cato Institute report found drug use among teens had dropped, rates of new HIV infections from sharing dirty needles dropped, and the number of people seeking treatment for addiction more than doubled and the country boasted the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over the age of 15 at 10 per cent.
The biggest issue may be implementation. An effective decriminalization policy would, as Portugal's did, funnel much more money into prevention and treatment programs.
The cash windfall from regulating drugs may prove too tempting for governments. For example, while they rail against the evils of smoking, they don't have programs to actually help people quit, they just keep raising the taxes.
What I am proposing may not be practical for Canada. It may not even be desirable, but I think if we are ever going to mitigate the harm being done to society, we have to have a long, serious and open discussion about legalizing drugs. As long as we're caught up in the vicious cycle of crime related to the drug trade, there is little hope that we can solve the problems that got us there in the first place.
