While we're at it, why not legalize all drugs? - Michael's essay

In 1994, the American writer Dan Baum interviewed John Ehrlichman, henchman to Richard Nixon and Watergate co-conspirator, about the opening volleys of the US War on Drugs in the 1970s.

Erlichman quite openly explained that the war on drugs was directed at two groups, which Nixon felt were his mortal enemies; young people and blacks.

Then, in a moment of extraordinary candor Ehrlichman said this: "By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities, arrest their leaders, raid their homes and vilify them night after night on the evening news."

Baum's gripping story in the April edition of Harper's Magazine underlines how the war on drugs was three things; a lie, a put up job and a complete failure.

Canada has never had a declared war on drugs, although we have always chosen interdiction and heavy law enforcement over common sense.

The Trudeau government is moving, carefully and cautiously, to decriminalize marijuana. And this week, a former prime minister, Jean Chretien, said such a change was long overdue.  

Actually a review of all our drug laws is long overdue. And if the stars and planets are properly aligned, Canada will, in the not too distant future, legalize all drugs, not just marijuana.

That's right, all of them — heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine, crack and powder and everything else in the illegal pharmacopeia.

Legalization would have, I submit, immediate and lasting benefits.

In the first place, it would tear a huge hole in the network of drug dealers here and abroad. Take away the demand, the supply dries up. Reduce the supply, no more drug dealers.

On top of which, because illegal drug users often resort to crime to pay for their habit, decriminalization would bring down those crime rates.

We might learn a thing or two from Portugal. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Portugal had the highest rate in the European Union of HIV among injecting drug users. Then in June 2001, Portugal passed a series of laws decriminalizing all drugs within its border — everything.

Rather than an epidemic of drug tourism, as everybody feared, drug usage actually went down. For example, Portugal has the lowest rate of marijuana usage in the EU, about 10 per cent of people over the age of 18. By contrast, in  the United States with some of the toughest drug laws in the world, the figure is 40 per cent. Experts now say that Portugal now manages and controls its drug problem better than any other country in the West.

It should be clear by now that prohibition doesn't work. It didn't work for alcohol in the Twenties and it doesn't work for drugs nearly a century later. Think of the billions now spent on enforcement, interdiction, court time, police resources, and imprisonment. Now think of that amount of money being spent on treatment and education.

This will only happen, though, when governments come to the understanding that drug use is a medical, not a criminal problem.