Canadian National Post, Evan Wood: Conservatives should get weak on drugs

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http://network.nationalpost.com/NP/b...-on-drugs.aspx

Evan Wood: Conservatives should get weak on drugs

Posted: April 26, 2010, 8:30 AM by NP Editor
Evan Wood

Citizens from across the political spectrum have largely considered illicit drugs such as cocaine and marijuana a grave threat to Canadian society. Accordingly, promises to get tough on drugs are proven vote-spinners for politicians coast-to-coast.

Not surprisingly, the mandatory minimum sentences for drug law violations proposed by the Harper government prior to prorogation received unconditional support from the federal Liberals. However, in more than four decades since former U.S. president Richard Nixon first declared America’s “War on Drugs,” researchers from across scientific disciplines have been closely examining the impacts of law enforcement strategies aimed at controlling illicit drug use. The findings clearly demonstrate that politically popular “get tough” approaches actually make the drug problem worse, fuel crime and violence, add to government deficits, rob the public purse of potential revenue, help spread disease and divide families.

In fact, the tough on crime approach takes its biggest toll on the traditional conservative wish list of fiscal discipline, low crime rates and strong families.

At a 1991 lecture called The Drug War as a Socialist Enterprise, conservative economist and Nobel Prize winner Milton Friedman noted: “There are some general features of a socialist enterprise, whether it’s the Post Office, schools or the war on drugs. The enterprise is inefficient, expensive, very advantageous to a small group of people and harmful to a lot of people.”

Friedman’s views about the certain failure of the war on drugs are shared by most economists who stress that costly efforts to remove drug supply by building prisons and locking up drug dealers have the perverse effect of making it that much more profitable for new drug dealers to get into the market. This simple fact explains why — despite $2.5-trillion spent in America’s war on drugs — drugs are more freely and easily available today than at any time in North American history.

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The rest of the article is at the above link.