DRUG CRAZED

The truth, on those rare occasions when it slips through the filter of political interest and emerges with crystalline purity from the mouth of a Cabinet minister, is an exciting thing. That’s why many Canadians were delighted to hear Herb Dhaliwal, revenue minister and Canadian representative at the United Nations’ conference on illicit drugs, admit that the core of the "War on Drugs" has been a failure. As the minister put it so succinctly, attacking the drug "supply side hasn’t worked, isn’t going to work and we need new bold initiatives."

Discounting the "new bold initiatives" bit—no minister ever recommends old timid initiatives—Mr. Dhaliwal’s statement is radiantly true. It is also a classic bit of Liberal duplicity, a ruse designed to create the image of a government hard at work developing new strategies to replace the old War on Drugs methods, which have so obviously failed.

That is a shameful fraud. The government not only has done nothing innovative in drug policy, it has committed Canada to staying the miserable, failed course of the War on Drugs.

Then, in May, Mr. Chretien nodded happily at the meeting of the G-8, when the assembled leaders specifically ruled out drug legalization and declared their intention to step up efforts to attack international drug smuggling and production—another of the supply-side strategies that Mr. Dhaliwal says don’t work.

One might conclude from the minister’s statement that he is a lone voice of reason in the Cabinet. Not so. Mr. Dhaliwal’s subsequent pronouncements indicate his thinking is just as muddled as his boss’s.

Take, for example, some of the policies that he proudly described after insisting that attacking the supply side doesn’t work. First, there’s a bill in the works that will require closer tracking of all financial transactions greater than $10,000. Then there are plans for new anti-smuggling intelligence operations, to be backed up by new technologies. So, if we may paraphrase Mr. Dhaliwal, because attacks on drug supply cannot succeed, his government is planning new attacks on drug supply. As if to underline the absurdity, Mr. Dhaliwal also boasted about the volume of drug seizures this year.

Consider, as well, Mr. Dhaliwal’s statement that treatment and rehabilitation programs are cheaper and more effective than prisons. That’s true enough, but in the next breath, he ruled out any form of decriminalization, even though, as just about every drug counsellor agrees, criminalization seriously hampers treatment and rehabilitation.

This inducement effect has been studied to death, and it has been shown, time and again, that, as a rule, marijuana does not lead users to harder drugs. In fact, that conclusion was upheld by two Canadian judges who, in the past year, presided over marijuana possession trials in which all the latest scientific evidence was reviewed. If Mr. Dhaliwal doubts the activists and editorialists, maybe he should listen to Canada’s judges.