By Nate Hendley (Note from Mapinc: Journalist Nate Hendley is a long time participant in the Canadian Media Awareness Project and their email list - MATTALK: http://www.islandnet.com/~creator/cmap/ )

THE RIGHT WING IS ON DRUGS

How Conservatives Tuned In, Turned On And Took Over The Legalization Debate In Canada

Patrick Basham’s been thinking a lot about drugs lately, which is something you can’t really avoid when you live in Vancouver. As Canada’s opiate and marijuana capital, Vancouver has the highest rate of HIV infection among intravenous drug users in the Western world and some of the strongest pot in North America. It’s also one of the few places in Canada where needle drug users openly spike in the streets, especially in the squalid 40 square blocks that make up the down town eastside.

Basham, who used to live near the eastside, recalls seeing people injecting heroin and cocaine, "literally every day...at eight in the morning, people would be shooting up, making sales. At the office, I’d tell people the latest thing I was offered for sale."

Last fall, Basham attended a drug-policy conference organized by the Hoover Institute, a prestigious American think-tank. That conference combined with his daily experience seeing addicts in his neighborhood, convinced him that "something had to be done and soon."

"I used to believe the costs of legalization outweighed the benefits" he recalls. "Then I moved to the other side."

Basham, who works as a director of the institute’s social affairs centre, points out that all his organization is doing is playing catch-up with the United States. A number of American right-wing individuals and groups have preached the legalization line for years.

Like the Fraser Institute, these right-wing reformers are less interested in dropping acid than rescinding what they consider dangerously expanded state powers, unclogging courts and saving money in incarceration costs. But most rightist reformers are fueled by anti-government ideology, not any sympathy for drug addicts, and some of their proposals seem as amazingly awful as the Drug War itself.

Still, right-wingers do hold one major advantage over the type of people who’ve populated the reform movement until recently. When it comes to talking about legal hash and heroin, conservatives in suits are generally taken more seriously than tie-dyed hippies or liberals with mushy notions of law and order. "The Fraser Institute is seen as a very creditable organization." says Basham. "Which is one of the reasons we decided to hold this conference. We want to make drug legalization a creditable debate."

In spite of his concerns about public image, Emery has little fear of making a complete ass of himself if it helps the anti-Drug War cause. Probably the nation’s best-known drug activist, he’s been kicked out of courtrooms for heckling judges and handed out joints in front of court buildings.

A self-described "Ayn Rand stripe libertarian," Emery believes that government "has no useful social purpose except to make people’s lives more miserable." He opposes unions, the welfare state, universal health care and people who think it’s immoral to make money off drugs.

Back in 1994, Emery opened a Vancouver shop called HempBC, a business that aimed to be a head shop with a difference. Emery’s timing was good: by the early nineties, drug law reform was slowly re-entering public consciousness after lying dormant for more than a decade.

North America’s brief fling with drug reform- 11 U.S. states decriminalized marijuana in the seventies and Canada seemed on the verge of doing the same- died abruptly after Ronald Reagan was elected president. Reagan ignited America’s War on Drugs in 1981, and Canada followed suit three years later with Brian Mulroney’s election.

The Drug War was so pervasive by the time HempBC got off the ground that a lot of the items Emery sold- such as pot growing books and magazines like High Times- were technically illegal. That didn’t bother Emery much, and last year he opened a companion business in Vancouver called the Cannabis Cafe. The cafe was North America’s first Amsterdam-style hash bar, where patrons could munch on veggie food and take advantage of vaporizers at their tables should they feel the need to take a toke.

Emery grossed $3.5 million in sales last year and at one point employed 43 people at his HempBC store. American journalists were so impressed they put Emery on the cover of the Wall Street Journal and featured him in Rolling Stone.

Meanwhile, roughly 600,000 Canadians hold criminal records for pot possession, which can make it impossible to cross the border or get certain jobs. And our government spends about half a billion a year on drug law enforcement, with few signs of letting people like Emery run legal drug operations.

Some federal politicians do support reform, but it’s unlikely many would have endorsed the platform Emery used during his 1996 mayoral bid. Emery promised to turn Vancouver’s welfare recipients into pot grower’s, provided they stop accepting social assistance benefits. "Anyone can grow pot." Emery notes. "Invalids, old people. We’d set them up."

Emery ended up in fifth place with 1500 votes. Unsuccessful as a politician, Emery’s provided a far more valuable service for the reform cause: by running HempBC and the Cannabis Cafe for as long as he did, he gave Canada a glimpse at what post-Drug War society might look like.

"Our intent was to pretend marijuana was legal," explains Emery. "our motto was "Revolution through Retail." We figured retail sales would pay us to promote our point of view."

To find out where Marc Emery developed his singular world view, it’s necessary to go to London, Ontario, where he ran a used book store called City Lights in the eighties.

Outraged that the Criminal Code outlawed literature that "promoted" drug use, Emery unsuccessfully tried to get himself arrested by stocking his store with High Times . He also took time in 1984 to help found the Freedom Party of Ontario. (FP), an organization that remains the "only political party that supports legalizing drugs," in the words of leader Robert Metz.

The Freedom Party is small- it garnered only one to two-and-a half per cent of the vote in the dozen ridings it contested in the 1995 provincial election- but its presence helps explain right-wing support for legalization. Like the split between social democrats and revolutionaries on the left, the right houses at least two overlapping but often antagonistic bodies: libertarians and social conservatives.

Social conservatives, says Osgoode Hall law professor and drug law activist Alan Young, "tend to be motivated by what they call "family values." Their general approach to drug use is that it’s destructive to families and kids."

Libertarians, as their name implies, view individual liberties as paramount and big government as satanic. They also believe, as Metz does, that people have the "right to intoxicate themselves with any substance... As long as they’re not harming anyone else, the state shouldn’t interfere." Metz, who thinks marijuana should have the same legal status as asparagus," says his views are widely shared among right-wingers, but that most of them won’t talk about it.

The Freedom Party, however, feels so strongly about drug policy that they offered financial support when fellow Londoner Chris Clay tried to overturn Canada’s pot laws. In 1995, Clay was hit with possession and trafficking charges after an undercover officer bought cannabis plants at his store, Hemp Nation. With activist Alan Young, Clay launched a constitutional challenge that stated pot had been arbitrarily placed in Canada’s Criminal Code and wasn’t harmful enough to criminalize.

To fund his challenge, Clay sold $25. "victory bonds" redeemable for a quarter ounce of pot once marijuana was legalized. The Freedom Party bought a thousand bucks worth of them.

Despite this support, Clay ended up losing his case- receiving probation and a small fine- and anyway, it’s doubtful the FP’s assistance counts for much. Not only is it a fringe party, libertarianism has always been regarded as suspicious by Canadian voters.

Coming as more of a shock was the ultrareactionary Alberta Report magazine’s sympathetic cover story on Chris Clay’s trial. The Report’s story on Clay didn’t quite come out and say pot is good for you, but it editorialized strongly against the excesses of the Drug War.

The U.S. spends more than $30 billion on anti-drug efforts and sets the death penalty for non-violent drug crimes such as large-scale pot cultivation. Back in 1980, about one in 15 prisoners entering state jails had been charged with drug offences; 13 years later, that figure was roughly one in three. And most U.S. drug prisoners are non-white—a reflection of laws that call for federal penalties 100 more times severe for crack cocaine (primarily considered a "black drug", than powder cocaine(used primarily by whites).

As a result of these extreme policies, there is a far more radical reaction against the Drug war in the U.S. than anything you’d find in Canada. Take judge Jim Gray a conservative Republican in Orange County, California. Judge Gray wants to allow the’ sale of marijuana, heroin, and cocaine In a "strictly controlled, regulated fashion" to adults.

The products would be sold in pharmacies, wrapped in a plain brown paper and wouldn’t be advertised. Such a regulatory system, says the judge, would eliminate the black market for drugs, drastically clear court dockets and jail space, and "drive the criminals out of the business."

Judge Gray isn’t the only right-winger in America with these ideas:

Libertarian economist Milton Friedman was talking about legalizing heroin back in the seventies. Ultra-conservative publisher William F. Buckley has used his National Review magazine to publish pro-legalization cover stories.
See How the Narcs Created Crack
And a conservative comrade of Buckley’s named Dick Cowan used to head up the National Organization for reform Of Marijuana Laws (NORML)
(Ed. note: Aw, shucks)

For the most part, the U.S. Congress remains bitterly opposed to legalization, but in Europe dramatic changes have been going on. Spain, Italy, and Germany all recently decriminalized marijuana or other drugs. France is contemplating wide-scale legal reforms and there is growing pressure in Britain to decriminalize pot. Even in the U.S., two states-Arizona and California passed referendums that legalized medical marijuana in 1996. Indeed, Young insists he’s seen "greater movement (toward legalizing drugs) in the past five years," and many would agree with him.

This March, the Canadian government officially lifted a 60-yr.-old ban on growing commercial hemp, the non-intoxicating sister plant of marijuana. Used to make rope and clothes, not joints, hemp was demonized for years because of its association with pot. The Liberals legalized the stuff because of fierce lobbying efforts from an unlikely coalition of farmers and bankers. Farmers, especially those who grow tobacco, were looking for a new, low-maintenance crop. Bank of Montreal, which sponsored a pro-hemp symposium in Vancouver, scented profits in the wind from a legal commercial hemp industry.

And although the liberals introduced the extremely punitive controlled Drugs and Substances Act last year, there was opposition. Weirdly enough, it came from the hidebound senate. After the bill passed the House of Commons in the fall of 1995, it went to the Senate, where a legal committee recommended criminal sanctions on pot be dropped. This led to one of the more amusing media stories of recent times: elderly Senators endorsing decrim while their supposedly more progressive Commons counterparts offered feeble excuses as to why it couldn’t be done.

C-8 was made law without the pot provisions recommended by the Senate but since then, it’s been a Reform MP, Jim Hart of Okanagan-Coquihalla, B.C., who has done the most to keep the decrim debate before the House. Last fall, Hart put forward a private member’s motion to investigate the possibility of legalizing medical marijuana. Motion M-260 would allow people with serious ailments such as cancer, AIDS, glaucoma and epilepsy to use medical cannabis without fear of going to jail.

Hart launched the motion after meeting with a constituent with a skull fracture who found "marijuana was the only thing that offers him any relief". Asked if his support for medical pot contradicts social conservative cant that all illicit drug use is immoral, Hart says, "The conservatism I believe in is listening to the grassroots, responding in a compassionate manner." He opposes recreational pot use but says most of his fellow Reformers feel (M-260) was a worthwhile motion"

Alan Young is buoyed by these signs of conservative support, but bristles at the notion that the drug reform movement’s been taken over by right-wingers. "This issue transcends traditional political stances," he insists. "Anyone with the proper education will support decriminalization or legalization."

The War on Drugs was started by conservatives , so the fact that so many right-wingers are defecting from the cause might be a sign the battles really coming to a close. That’s good news for people who worry about the police kicking in their doors, but bad news if the kind of proposals proffered by the right are actually put into place.

Currently, in both Canada and the U.S., the poor bear the worst brunt of the Drug War; statistics show that they’re far more likely to be arrested on flimsy drug charges and sentenced to long terms than middle-class users. Libertarian reforms would end the police-state tactics that people in low-income neighborhoods currently endure but wouldn’t do much for them if they got addicted.

The "right to self-intoxication" that Metz talks about comes with its own self-correcting corollary: get stoned if you want, but don’t expect free treatment if you get high too often. Libertarians would privatize health care, including rehab, which means state-run needle exchanges, methadone clinics and treatment centres offering low or no-cost services would no longer exist. Private rehab would still flourish, but how many street addicts could come up with the cash for a high-priced detox bed?

Even if you could care less about the health and well-being of drug users, public-health treatment programs make good fiscal sense. Providing clean needles to prevent the spread of HIV is a lot cheaper than treating AIDS patients. Even Margaret Thatcher recognized this reality, which is why she legalized needle exchanges in England back in the eighties.

Offering free methadone, which heroin addicts use to ease the pain of withdrawal, might seem obscene to non-drug users, except that methadone spares everyone a lot of misery. On methadone, opiate addicts are far more likely to hold down jobs and maintain normal family lives. Also, methadone patients commit fewer crimes because they don’t have to rob people to pay for expensive smack habits.

If they’re blind to the benefits of public health, libertarians also have some pretty bad ideas about how a legal drug market might operate. In Europe, the model has been toward state regulation: the pot-head haven of Amsterdam, for example, operates under strict government rules that prohibit hash bars from advertising their wares, making sales to minors and selling hard drugs. In places such as Switzerland, opiate addicts can get legal heroin, but only if they register and inject at state clinics. These kinds of initiatives- however successful they’ve been in eliminating black markets and lowering crime and HIV among needle users- are anathema to libertarians who view any degree of government control as an affront to individual liberty.

"Never let the government regulate drugs," snaps Emery, "That’s maybe more insidious than keeping it illegal. The government shouldn’t decide what is dangerous and what isn’t." Emery believes the free market’s more than up to the task of selling coke and cannabis.

But one has only to look to the example of tobacco and alcohol companies to realizes how problematic this is. Until very recently, both industries have taken a completely hands-off attitude to the potential harms of their products. U.S. tobacco companies, in fact, denied for decades that there could be any health problems associated with cigarettes.

"I’m a little uneasy about heroin brought to you by Nike," says Neev Tapiero. "If someone were in a position to make money of heroin, it wouldn’t be beneath corporations to do it."

Tapiero lives in Toronto and acts as spokesperson for the Medical Marijuana Centeres on Ontario, an above-ground but highly illegal collective of pot clubs. He supports the legalization of all drugs- provided the government plays a role in how they’re sold- and an extensive social-services net. primarily concerned with getting medical pot to his clients, not arguing about ideology, Tapiero insists drug policy reform is "not a left-wing or a right-wing issue."

Patrick Basham agrees. "On this issue, we might find our greatest allies on what used to be the traditional left."

Combine the left’s traditional support for the disadvantaged with the right’s mistrust of ill-considered state spending and you could have a powerful anti-Drug War mix. But you’d also have a very tenuous one: the legalizers might unite, but that’s only because the War on Drugs is such a clear and present danger that reformers would be foolish not to seek alliances. Once it’s over it’s doubtful all the various advocates of legalization could agree on the terms of withdrawal.

The choices range from well-regulated access to narcotics and widespread, accessible treatment, to a laissez-faire model where the free market rules and government does nothing. Drug peace, orderly distribution and good health care, or the right to pursue individual happiness with a syringe and no safety net for burnouts. In the end, the real problem might not be in ending the Drug War, but in securing the most humane peace.

DAILY NEWS TOPS POT RAD SCALE FRASER INSTITUTE SAYS
July 2, 1998
From the Halifax Daily News

It focused on 122 reports that contained the words drug, drugs, legalize, legalization, decriminalize and decriminalization. The institute gave no points to reports supporting the status quo, one point for advocating harm reduction, two points for decriminalization and three points for legalization. "The Halifax Daily News was the most ‘radical’ of the newspapers with a score of 66, and CBC’s National Magazine the least radical with a score of 21," says the study published in the June issue of Fraser Forum. This newspaper came out on top because of its letters to the editor, said Fraser Forum researcher Kate Morrison. "It was the fact that so many people had written letters to The Halifax Daily News in support of legalization that resulted in you topping the rad-scale," said Morrison. The On Balance section of the Fraser Forum - where the results appear - studies a "wide variety of public policy issues," she said. Morrison said she chose to look at mostly port cities for the comparison. "I felt that they would have probably the most crime associated with drugs," she said. "But then I never had time to do the research to see if indeed that was the case."