The following is a response from Craig jones Executive Director of the John Howard society to a letter written to the Winnipeg sun.
Dear Mr. Banek:
Thanks for writing to the Winnipeg Sun.
People need to understand that there is more than one option where illicit drugs are concerned.
Here’s mine: Not legalization, RE-regulation. The difference is important.
I have never endorsed legalization — but I do call for re-regulation.
In public policy, “regulation” means management according to some rational and revisable criteria, rather than by random, chaotic chance.
Most of the modern world regulates everything that comes into contact with citizens: from securities to radio bandwith, from milk to banks to air-travel safety to telecommunications to food production to children’s toys to drinking water. Everything that touches us is regulated according to some criteria embedded in laws, enforceable – ultimately – by the state.
These things are all legal, but they’re also heavily regulated. Just try to sell unpasteurized milk from your own cows to your next door neighbour.
By and large, most regulations work pretty well. We do have our Walkertons and our Dr. Charles Smith events, but these are few and far between. Regulation has its critics but it prevents a lot of McCain food-like disasters.
We regulate everything according to criteria specific to the product or service and its impact on public well being. Different forms of regulation for different products and services, whether Goodyear Tires or Tupperware.
These regulations are informed by statistics and other forms of evidence. We would never consider regulating something – like smoke alarms or baby formula – without having a great deal of evidence about how those regulations will or will not produce benefit rather than harm.
Regulation is about rationality and predictability. It’s about understanding the balance of harms and benefits and creating the conditions to maximize benefits and minimize harms.
This, at least, is how political scientists (like me) understand regulation.
With regard to illicit drugs, we use a form of regulation called “prohibition.” Prohibition relies on punishment and threat of punishment through the criminal justice system.
Prohibition is supposed to work through the magic of deterrence. You won’t touch drugs because you know that if you get busted you’ll get a criminal record and your life chances will be negatively affected.
We do with illicit drugs, in other words, what was once done with alcohol – and with the same results: violence, corruption, graft and death.
In essence -- and this is the point – we regulate the production, distribution and consumption of illicit drugs by handing it over to the contest between organized crime and police.
As a consequence, organized crime is thriving. Prices to users are lower, supply is better and purity is higher than 40 years ago when Richard Nixon declared his “war on drugs.”
Quoting from a recent court ruling here in Ontario: “People have been going to jail for drug offences for – for a couple of generations now and the drug – the drug plague is worse than it ever was ... If something doesn't work, do I try doing it again and again to see if it does work? Isn't that the definition of insanity?”
The big crime syndicates have Spanish names today. Instead of Al Capone it’s Miguel Caro Quintero. Instead of alcohol, it’s cocaine, ecstasy, cannabis and meth.
Big seizures are made on a weekly basis, yet supply is unaffected – and a handful of powerful organized criminal groups get fabulously wealthy: enough to literally outgun police and military forces in Mexico and to purchase the government of Afghanistan.
Illicit drug profits constitute the oxygen of organized crime – globally, nationally and locally.
These are facts you can confirm with the UN World Drug Report
www.unodc.org/
Prohibition fails because it attempts to negate the iron laws of supply and demand.
So this form of regulation – called prohibition -- enriches organized crime but does nothing to address demand, i.e., reduce the flow of drugs to users on the street. It brings with it lots of violence, deaths by overdose, disease transmission, police corruption, swollen prisons, etc.
Prohibition is a policy choice, not a law of nature like gravity. We chose to use prohibition in 1908 for racist purposes and we’ve only added to it and built on it since.
The worst effect of drug prohibition is that it creates incentives for our political leaders to lie to us – and to make promises they know they can’t keep.
And the same is true of police: in private they admit that (in their words), “We’ll never arrest out way out of our drug problems” but in public they have to play the prohibition game even though they will admit (in private) that drug prohibition corrupts cops and destroys the profession.
Prohibition CREATES crime. Always has and always will.
Don’t take my word for it: see www.leap.cc/
See this excellent essay by Gil Puder – who used to work to the downtown eastside of Vancouver: www.leap.cc/
More recently, see this video of the Senate Testimony of Constable David Bratzer: www.youtube.
My claim here is that prohibition -- as a form of regulation -- produces so many undesirable consequences that we ought to abandon it and choose a form of regulation that gives us more of what we want and less of what we don’t want.
What I want less of – much less of – is organized crime, drug gangs and drug-business criminality.
What I want more of – much more of – is education, prevention, harm reduction, public health and community safety.
So I favour a form of regulation that would NOT create incentives for organized criminal gangs to control the drug trade – because, for me, organized crime and drug gangs are the worst of all evils.
Not everyone will agree with this. Everyone who studies this issue agrees that prohibition gives rise to organized criminal violence – but some people are willing to tolerate a certain amount of violence by organized crime because they think that, eventually, we’ll figure out how to apply the right police resources to eradicate it once and for all.
I’m doubtful. We’ve been at it for 101 years and we’re no closer. Not even the Americans, who employ much greater police force and violence, have been successful.
So I would endorse a system of RE-regulation – there are many models on offer – that took the production, distribution and consumption of currently illicit drugs out of the hands of organized crime.
Does this imply legalization?
It could, for some substances, but it does not HAVE to.
It all depends on what we – as a society – choose to regulate in the interests of public safety versus that which we leave to organized crime.
And that depends on how much we are willing to tolerate the participation of organized crime because – on the evidence of the last 101 years – they are going to meet a market demand whatever the penalties enacted in prohibitionist laws.
Virtually every government-commissi
So cannabis should – on the evidence – be decriminalized and regulated so as to control for quality, purity and access to young persons.
My preference is to regulate AGAINST the interests of organized criminal gangs – but there are other ways to regulate too, to trade off competing values where drugs are concerned.
So that’s it: if it were up to me I would design a system of regulation which sucked the oxygen out of the black market and took the profit out of supplying the market for currently illicit drugs. That would be my priority.
--
Craig Jones, Ph.D. | Executive Director
The John Howard Society of Canada
809 Blackburn Mews, Kingston, Ontario, K7P 2N6
email: cjones@johnhoward.
Tel: 613.384.6272 | Fax: 613.384.1847
http://www.johnhowa
--
"I think what was truly depressing about my time in [the UK’s] Anti-Drug Coordination Unit was that the overwhelming majority of professionals I met, including those from the police, the health service, the government and voluntary sectors held the same view: the illegality of drugs causes far more problems for society and the individual than it solves.”
~ Julian Critchley, former director of the Cabinet Office's Anti-Drug Coordination Unit, quoted in “Ex-drugs policy director calls for legalisation,” The Manchester Guardian, Wednesday, August 13, 2008.
From: ccc-members@
Sent: December-17-
To: ccc-members@
Subject: [CCC] MB: LTE: CUT JOHN HOWARD FUNDING
Letters to the Editor: letters@wpgsun.
Thursday, December 17, 2009
CUT JOHN HOWARD FUNDING
Re: 'What's their plan?' Tom Brodbeck, Dec. 13.
Why are tax dollars being used to fund a group committed to the legalization of hard core drugs?
The John Howard Society is a collection of misfits who have been running interference on law and order by advocating for criminals and their lawyers.
If they want to take that position in public that's their right and they are free to do so, but we are not obligated to pay for it.
Use your head for a change and cut their funding Harper, or do you secretly agree with them?
BARRY BANEK
WINNIPEG
Misfits? We don't agree.
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