Editorials

Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

Drug laws spark drug wars

By: Staff Writer

Posted: 08/4/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

The idea that the users of illegal drugs are responsible for the drug trade and the crime that surrounds it is nothing new. Neither i it entirely preposterous. If there were no market, there would be no trade and if there were no trade there we be no profit and if there were no profit there would be no point to the crime that surrounds it today.

So it may be that the St. James businessman who snorts a little cocaine, the South St. Vital housewife who smokes a little weed, the Broadway boulavardier who likes his uppers or downers are responsible for the drug trade because they are the market.

But as we know, and as history shows us, if that supposition is not entirely preposterous, it is mostly preposterous. Crime, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and it naturally fills one when it occurs. Prohibition attempted to destroy the market for alcoholic beverages; instead it simply created the organized crime syndicates that plague North American society to this day.

Exorbitant taxes on tobacco are meant to curb the smoking of cigarettes, but all they have done is to create a hugely profitable black market that exists across the country and has turned some native reserves in Ontario and Quebec into conduits for smuggled cigarettes and lawless principalities that recognize no civil authority.

Much of the gang violence that plagues Winnipeg's inner city is attributed to turf war over the highly lucrative drug trade. It has been suggested that the shooting at a wedding reception in the North End last week was part of a drug-trade related gang war and that, because they continue to indulge their appetites, the St. Vital housewife and the Broadway boulavardier are responsible for the death and the injuries.

If, in fact, that shooting is connected to the drug trade, it is not users who are responsible. It is the gunman and, ironically, the law itself that is to blame for the violence. Simply put, you do not need to deal with a gangster if you can buy your marijuana, or even your cocaine, at a store regulated and controlled by the government, just as you can now buy your tobacco and your alcohol.

Canadian governments have been slow to recognize the obvious, that the only way to eliminate drug-related crime is to take the criminality out of the use of drugs. The furthest any Canadian government has been willing to go is to suggest that it might be possible to decriminalize marijuana. That would not make use of the drug legal, but it would allow for it under certain circumstances. Bills proposing that were proposed three times by Liberal governments since 2002 but they died on the order paper.

One would have to be blindly optimistic to imagine that the Conservative government of Stephen Harper, which doesn't even like the idea of safe injection sites, will propose a similar bill.

Even if it were to do so, however, it would not be enough to solve the problem this country faces. The decriminalization of marijuana is not nearly enough. The problem is not so much the use of drugs as the illegality of that use. Education can moderate and reduce drug use when it is out in the open -- it is the crime that surrounds the drug trade that is the country's cancer. Until a federal government has the courage to recognize that, to accept its responsibility to the citizens of Winnipeg and Canadians across the country, the drugs and the profits from them will remain in the hands of criminals, and drug wars will continue.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition August 4, 2009 A10

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