How enforcing prohibition creates street crime

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have made a compelling case that drug prohibition and backwards welfare rules increase criminal activity.

A team led by Kora DeBeck and Thomas Kerr surveyed injection drug users in the Vancouver area. They asked, "If you didn't need the money to pay for your drug use, are there any sources of income in the last 30 days that you would eliminate?"

In that study, 62 percent of sex workers and 41 percent of drug dealers said that they would cease their criminal activities if they did not need the extra income for drugs.

It may seem obvious that streetwalkers don't like their jobs. However, a scientific study like this is exactly the sort of evidence that is necessary to change public policy. The researchers were able to eloquently use their findings to highlight the shortcomings of Canadian laws and social services. That critique, and the results of their survey, will appear in an upcoming issue of the journal Drug and Alcohol Dependence .

DeBeck and Kerr began with a simple argument; seizures and arrests by law enforcement agencies raise drug prices. This makes it hard for serious addicts to afford their habits without resorting to prostitution, drug dealing, panhandling, binning, and other illegal activities.

By disrupting drug markets and increasing risks involved in producing and distributing illegal substances, prohibition-based drug enforcement policies play a role in inflating drug prices, which in turn induces active IDU (injection drug users) with high intensity addictions to engage in prohibited income generating behavior to finance their drug use. While the ultimate objective of inducing high drug prices is to deter drug use, this analysis and a growing body of research indicates that the unintended consequences of these enforcement-based policies produce significant harm for drug using individuals and broader society.

Here is the biggest policy dilemma: people that receive financial assistance from the government will lose their support if they earn more than a minuscule amount from legitimate sources. This standard, intended to keep checks out of the hands of people that don't need them, may also strongly discourage the rightful recipients from pursuing normal work. Since there are no records of the illegal transactions, the drug dealers and sex workers can have their cake and eat it too.

Furthermore, the current structure of social assistance in Canada is such that recipients will lose their income benefits if they begin to earn above $400 per month through legitimate work, leaving this population with limited income generating options beyond resorting to prohibited sources.

At the end of their report, the scholars offered several more ways to keep problematic dependent users out of trouble: increase the availability of low-end jobs, make heroin available by prescription, and offer methadone or stimulant substitutes for free.

One method of trying to reduce engagement in prohibited income generation among drug user populations with severe addictions is to expand their economic opportunities. This would involve supporting the development of legitimate means of earning income through various low threshold employment opportunities and skill building measures. A recent intervention designed to economically empower drug addicted sex trade workers to develop alternative legitimate sources of income has been shown to have a positive influence on reducing involvement in the sex trade industry. Alternatively, policy makers could intervene by providing addiction prescription and substitution therapies to individuals with markers of serious addiction to decrease their reliance on, and subsequent need to purchase, street drugs. This could be achieved in part through heroin prescription programs and by expanding substitution therapies including methadone maintenance.

this is an edited version of guest article on Respectacle by Aaron Rowe

US Drugs Tsar gets a frosty reception in Canada

The US Drugs Tsar is currently on tour in Canada, part of his ongoing mission to export and entrench the disastrous 'War on Drugs' around the world, whilst simultaneously condemning and undermining moves toward such dangerous concepts as 'harm reduction'.

Canada has little or nothing to learn from the US' beyond how not to do it. This was made abundently clear at a press cnference organised by the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy which included the following line up of top-draw speakers:

*Larry W. Campbell, Senator, former Mayor of Vancouver, former RCMP Drug Squad member, and former Chief Coroner of British Columbia.
*Ethan Nadelmann, director of the Drug Policy Alliance, the leading organisation in the US promoting alternatives to the war on drugs, former Princeton University professor and author of several books and articles on policing, crime control and drug policy
*Professor Line Beauchesne, Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa, the author of several books on drug policy, and co-founder, Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy.
*Dr David Marsh, former preseident of the Canadian Society for Addiction Medicine

hosted by: Eugene Oscapella, Ottawa lawyer, co-founder, Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy, and lecturer on drug policy in the Department of Criminology, University of Ottawa.

The press conference has been filmed and posted on youtube. The first installment, featuring Ethan Nadleman and Eugene Oscapella can be viewed below (the quality isn't going to win any awards but it perfectly watchable):



to see the following sections click:

Part 2 - Eugene Oscapella & Senator Larry Campbell
Part 3 - Eugene Oscapella & Line Beauchesne
Part 4: Eugene Oscapella & Dr. David Marsh
Part 5: Q&A from reporters
Part 6: Q&A continued
Part 7: Q&A continued

The following article by Ethan Nadleman, summing up a lot of these sentiments, appeared in the Ottawa Citizen:

Canada must not follow the U.S. on drug policy

Ethan Nadelmann
Citizen Special

Thursday, February 22, 2007

The U.S. drug czar, John Walters, is in Ottawa today, trying his best to put a positive spin on one of the greatest disasters in U.S. foreign and domestic policy. Part of his agenda is to persuade Canada to follow in U.S. footsteps, which can only happen if Canadians ignore science, compassion, health and human rights.

The United States ranks first in the world in per-capita incarceration, with roughly five per cent of the earth's population but 25 per cent of the total incarcerated population. Russia and China simply can't keep up. Among the 2.2 million people behind bars today in the United States, roughly half a million are locked up for drug-law violations, and hundreds of thousands more for other "drug-related" offences. The U.S. "war on drugs" costs at least $40 billion U.S. a year in direct costs, and tens of billions more in indirect costs.

It's all useful information for Canadians to keep in mind when being encouraged to further toughen their drug laws to bring them in line with those of the United States.

What's most remarkable about U.S. drug policy is the way it endures despite persistent evidence that it is ineffective, costly and counterproductive. One report after another -- by the U.S. General Accountability Office, the National Academy of Sciences, independent agencies and even the Bush administration itself -- consistently fault federal drug-control programs for failing to achieve their objectives.

But funding nonetheless persists. The DARE (Drug Abuse Resistance
Education) program, which relies on police to "educate" young people about drugs, keeps being funded despite an impressive run of studies demonstrating no effect on adolescent drug use. Ditto for the government's border interdiction and anti-drug ad campaigns, and its funding of federal-state anti-drug task forces, and much else.

Drug-policy reformers in the United States have been cheered by Canada's willingness -- at least until now -- to look to Europe rather than the United States for drug-control models. When HIV/AIDS started spreading a generation ago among people who inject drugs, both Europe and Canada were quick to implement needle exchanges and other harm-reduction programs, even as the United States opted instead to allow hundreds of thousands to become infected and die needlessly.

Heroin-prescription trials are now underway in Montreal and Vancouver, trying to determine whether what worked so well in Switzerland, Germany, The Netherlands and other countries can also work in Canada. The same is true of supervised injection sites, which have proven effective in reducing fatal overdoses, transmission of infectious diseases and drug-related nuisance. And most recently, Vancouver's mayor, Sam Sullivan, has broken new ground by proposing that cocaine and methamphetamine addicts be prescribed legal substitutes.

But I wonder whether Canada just can't help following in U.S. footsteps. DARE survives in Canada too, notwithstanding evidence of its lack of efficacy. Almost three quarters of Canadian federal drug-strategy spending is for law-enforcement initiatives, few of which demonstrate any success in reducing drug problems. "While harm-reduction interventions supported through the drug strategy are being held to an extraordinary standard of proof," the director of the B.C. Centre for Excellence in HIV/AIDS, Dr. Julio Montaner, recently observed, "those receiving the greatest proportion of funding remain under-evaluated or have already proven to be ineffective."

The survival of Vancouver's supervised-injection facility is currently at risk, for reasons having everything to do with politics and nothing with science or health, while federal drug-enforcement authorities know that all they need to do to preserve funding is make arrests and avoid scandal.

What matters most to U.S. drug czar John Walters, though, is cannabis, which he occasionally, and absurdly, describes as the most dangerous of all drugs. Seventy per cent of Americans say cannabis should be legal for medical purposes, and one study after another points to its efficacy and safety as a medicine. A similar percentage also think personal possession of marijuana should be decriminalized (i.e., resulting in fines rather than arrest and incarceration) and 40 per cent say it should be taxed, controlled and regulated, more or less like alcohol.

But Mr. Walters will have none of it. He travels the country, railing against cannabis and urging schools to drug test all students, without cause -- and without any scientific evidence that testing will work. And when he visits or talks about Canada, it's typically to complain -- erroneously -- that Canada is a major supplier of marijuana for the U.S., never mind the fact that Americans now produce most of the marijuana consumed in the United States.

Canada needs to lead, not follow, the United States when it comes to dealing sensibly with drugs. Mr. Walters's Canadian hosts today should remind him of the 2002 report of the Canadian Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, chaired by Conservative Senator Pierre-Claude Nolin.

It's probably the best, most comprehensive, most evidence-based report on drug policy produced by any government in the past 30 years. And its recommendations are all about dealing with drugs as if politics were an afterthought, and all that mattered were reducing the harms associated with both drug use and failed drug policies. Imagine that.

Vancouver Mayor Seeks Drug Substitution Program

Acccording to this article published on the 1st August 2006 in the Vancouver Sun the mayor of Vancouver, Sam Sullivan, is seeking an experimental cocaine and crystal meth drug substitution program. Whilst a program is already underway in Vancouver for heroin which the mayor is confidant will result in a heroin maintenance program the same is not true for other highly addictive substances. The mayor is keen to act as a broker between any agency running such a program and donors since he admits that government processes would take too long. This is an encouraging proactive approach to stimulant addiction which will hopefully result in a rational treatment of addicts. However the emails from members of the public at the bottom of the article aren't all resoundingly positive.