What are G8 leaders smoking?

There is something very special about illicit drugs. If they don't always make the drug user behave irrationally, they certainly cause many non-users to behave that way. -- Harvard professor of medicine Lester Grinspoon.

IRRATIONALITY is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. Judged by this yardstick, the illicit-drug policies of most Western governments are indeed irrational. These policies do not achieve their stated aims -- reducing the supply of drugs, cutting crime, making citizens safer or weakening organized crime -- but rather the reverse. And yet British Prime Minister Tony Blair put a more vigorous prosecution of the international war on drugs high in the agenda of the leaders of the G8 nations meeting this past weekend in Birmingham.

Illicit-drug prices show a long-term decline, indicating plentiful and growing supply of a commodity that the UN estimates represents about 8 per cent of international trade. At the same time, prohibition makes drugs far more expensive than their cost of production. The price of pure heroin for medicinal purposes is about one-30th of the street price, and the difference goes straight to organized crime, a state-dictated subsidy to gangsterism.

The criminalization of drug use has massively increased crime, particularly of the victimless variety. Thousands of people in North America are in prison solely because they bought, sold or were in possession of illicit drugs. Many real crimes against persons and property are carried out by people whom drug-criminalization has marginalized and who have no other way of paying the prohibition-inflated costs of their drugs. In countries like Canada, citizens are endangered by street violence and the rise of blood-borne diseases like HIV and hepatitis C. Internationally, armed insurrections have been financed by drug money in countries like Peru, Afghanistan and Cambodia, and in Latin America and the Caribbean, judges, ministers, police and even presidential candidates are murdered by drug cartels.

Throughout the world, drug money finances corruption on a massive scale, undermining the rule of law and transferring power to those segments of the population brutal, clever and ruthless enough to supply a need that governments have naively tried to suppress. Raise the stakes by stepping up the war effort, and the outcome must be more lives ruined for victimless crimes and even fatter profits for even scarier people.

Of course drugs are harmful and their use has social costs, but reasonable people weigh these against the human and social cost of prohibition, which is measured not only in dollars, but in lost liberty, the coarsening of the law, the courts, the police and the prisons. According to one recent Canadian university study, the total cost of illicit drugs to the Canadian economy is a small fraction of the cost of alcohol use ($7.5-billion) or tobacco use ($9.6-billion). Many of the ills we traditionally associate with drug use are in fact the fruit of our drug policy, and a calmer policy would meliorate these ills.

Fortunately, a few courageous governments are beginning to say that the drug-war general has no clothes. Recent Swiss experiments with medically controlled heroin use, for example, show that many addicts were able to participate fully in society while paying the cost of their habit. Decriminalization allows strategies of harm reduction through regulation to be used with success, such as needle exchanges, making access for underage users more difficult and restricting sources of supply and acceptable venues for use.

Even in the United States, popular revulsion against the excesses of the war on drugs is making inroads. Four states now allow medical use of marijuana. Two of them -- Arizona and California -- decided this policy recently by strong popular votes in referendums.

Prohibition does not work and cannot work, and its costs are higher than those of a policy of properly supervised and regulated access to drugs. Given that the elimination of drugs from our society is not an option, the G8 leaders should have been asking themselves how they can minimize the harm that drugs represent. As it is, their policies maximize the damage.