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The pharmacist has your ecstasy ready

Apr. 16, 2006. 01:00 AM
BETSY POWELL, STAFF REPORTER

A Toronto weekend reveller pops into a local drugstore to pick
up some ecstasy. He's followed by an addict who's there to buy a
single-dose, non-reusable syringe for her fix.

Both transactions are administered by a pharmacist trained to
offer advice on the safest way to use the substances.

Nearby, at a "natural herbal products" outlet, pot smokers are
lined up for some grown-in-Ontario weed.

The sales are all legal, controlled, regulated and taxed — with
profits divided among suppliers, distributors and sellers once a
sizeable chunk of cash has been diverted to government coffers
for enforcement, management and treatment of drug dependency,
and for other social programs.

A far-fetched scenario?

Perhaps, but the Health Officers' Council of B.C., a group of
public-health physicians, suggested it was a workable strategy
in its landmark discussion paper released last fall.

The document, titled A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in
Canada, contends that removing criminal penalties for personal
drug possession and placing currently illegal substances under
tight controls could not only help to start and maintain
rehabilitation programs for addicts, but could also "reduce
secondary unintended drug-related harms to society that spring
from a failed criminal-prohibition approach."

The paper adds: "This would move individual harmful illegal drug
use from being primarily a criminal issue to being primarily a
health issue."

The arguments are persuasive: Legalizing illicit drugs would
substantially reduce the crime rate, largely by driving the
black market out of business and rendering it unnecessary for
addicts to commit petty theft.

"So much crime is due to people being driven by their
dependency," says Dr. Richard Mathias, a specialist in community
medicine and professor of public health at the University of
British Columbia. "If we could deal with that dependency and
make it not the focus of their lives, at least a reasonably high
percentage can get on with their lives, and don't have to steal
to get their drugs at a reasonable cost and reasonably safely."

He points to an Ottawa shelter that gives out small amounts of
alcohol. "It doesn't make them drunk, but the fact that even
with an alcohol addiction, if they know they are going to get
booze, they don't go into that seeking behaviour that dependency
drives them to. It's made a world of difference."

What hasn't, he and others argue, is the estimated $1 billion
spent annually on drug law enforcement in Canada. Yet there
never seems to be a shortage of drugs for people who want to get
high, the threat of arrest and prison notwithstanding.

The war on drugs is an abysmal failure, say
anti-prohibitionists, and it's time society took an alternative
approach that accepts "drug use is found everywhere in the
world, and we're never going to be a drug-free society," says
Philippe Lucas, a medicinal marijuana activist.

The council advised regulating drugs "in direct proportion to
the harm they can do."

Just as there are for alcohol and tobacco, there would be age
restrictions. Depending on the drug, there could also be
mandatory training and quantity could be rationed, and there
could be licensing and registration requirements.

Mathias, also health critic for the Green Party, which has put
the approach in its platform, said such a system doesn't
encourage wholesale drug abuse.

"We agree with the fundamental (tenet of) prohibition (which)
says don't use it," he says. "Public health says the same thing,
but if you're going to make a choice about drugs you have to do
so with knowledge."

It would need inspectors and police involvement, he adds,
because a "regulated market is regulated through law, and we
need enforcement, or profit motive will cause us problems again.

"Studies done have found it's harder for young people to buy
alcohol than it is to buy marijuana," Mathias adds.

And while we're taking the illicit out of drug use, Alan Young,
a York University law professor, suggests striking out laws that
prevent indoor prostitution, thereby opening the doors to a
red-light, brothel-type system in Toronto. "Under the current
laws, prostitutes are being endangered by the fact that they
can't work indoors," Young says.

"Prostitution per se is not illegal, but all the activities
associated with it, including the broadest one, communicating
for the purpose, they are all criminalized, so it's kind of a
paradox that you can do this legally but you can't do it in any
way that's safe, and that's why the law's deficient and should
change."

Residents would no longer worry about hookers and johns in their
'hoods. Police wouldn't need to do periodic "sweeps."

So where would Young put a Toronto red-light district?

"Nobody wants them in their backyard, but those aren't
insurmountable problems."

"A Public Health Approach to Drug Control in Canada"
<http://www.cfdp.ca/bchoc.pdf>