January 16, 2011 – Vancouver B.C. – All of Vancouver has been shocked by the city’s increasing gang violence. Sadly, the gunplay on Dec. 12, where 10 people were shot exiting a restaurant on Oak Street, is an occurrence that has become increasingly common in Canadian cities, and gang violence has long been a fact of life in most large U.S. cities. While reasons for gang affiliation are complex, there is no arguing that urban gangs — and virtually all other well-funded organized crime groups for that matter — derive their primary source of revenue from the trade in illegal drugs.

This violent reality has emerged as an unintended consequence of a more than a half-century long experiment aimed at reducing illegal drug supply through aggressive law enforcement. Remarkably, despite the U.S. taxpayer spending an estimated $2.5 trillion since America’s “War on Drugs” was launched by former president Richard Nixon, drugs remain more available today than at any time in our history, while drug market violence has continued to worsen. A recent international example is the upsurge in drug-related violence in Mexico, which has claimed more than 30,000 lives after Mexican President Felipe Calderon launched a crackdown on the cartels in 2006.

Around the world, virtually all leading economists who have considered this issue have stressed that any effective enforcement effort that successfully imprisons drug dealers has the immediate perverse effect of making it that much more profitable for new drug dealers to get into the drug supply business. Whether it’s coffee beans or cannabis, if you cut off supply, price goes up. Scientific research has also proven that successful law enforcement interventions that remove key members of drug gangs often lead to an increase in bloodshed as lower level members or competing gangs fight to maintain or gain market share.

Given the key contribution of cannabis prohibition to the growing success of organized crime in B.C., we must ask if there are measurable benefits of this extremely costly and violence-producing policy. With respect to limiting cannabis availability to young people, surveillance systems funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health have concluded that over the last 30 years of cannabis prohibition the drug has remained “almost universally available to American 12th graders.”

These U.S. data are undoubtedly applicable to Canadian youth given that these statistics were derived in a setting that spends an estimated $10 billion each year enforcing marijuana laws. Research funded by the U.S. government also clearly demonstrates that, even as federal funding for anti-drug efforts increased by more than 600 per cent over the last several decades, marijuana’s potency has nevertheless increased by 145 per cent since 1990, and its price has declined 58 per cent. For many of the above reasons, as well as the potential to generate a massive amount of tax revenue, a 2004 Fraser Institute report called for the outright legalization of cannabis, and a recent Angus Reid poll found that two thirds of British Columbians would legalize cannabis to reduce gang violence.

Despite a long-standing federally funded “public education” campaign aimed at shoring up U.S. public support for the nation’s war on drugs, a regulatory framework for cannabis was narrowly defeated in California this fall when a statewide ballot initiative proposing to “Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis” was supported by 46 per cent of voters.

In 1937, the year the U.S. criminalized the use of cannabis, the Commissioner of U.S. Federal Bureau of Narcotics Harry Anslinger testified to Congress, reportedly saying that “marijuana is the most violence-causing drug in the history of mankind.” In fact, there is clear consensus in the medical and scientific community that cannabis is substantially less harmful than alcohol and tobacco.

In fact, it is cannabis prohibition rather than the drug itself that has fueled the mounting violence. British Columbia is in desperate need of political leadership to promote a regulated system for cannabis control rather than the violent unregulated market that only benefits organized crime. Without a regulated cannabis control system to starve gangs of this financial windfall, we will without question see more gun violence and the continued growth of organized crime in this province. Source.

September 9, 2009 – It’s too early to say that there is a general revolt against the “war on drugs” that the United States has been waging for the past 39 years, but something significant is happening. European countries have been quietly defecting from the war for years, decriminalizing personal consumption of some or all of the banned drugs in order to minimize harm to their own people, but it’s different when countries like Argentina and Mexico do it.

Latin American countries are much more in the firing line. The United States can hurt them a lot if it is angered by their actions, and it has a long history of doing just that. But from Argentina to Mexico, they are fed up to the back teeth with the violent and dogmatic U.S. policy on drugs, and they are starting to do something about it.

In mid-August, the Mexican government declared that it will no longer be a punishable offense to possess up to half a gram of cocaine (about four lines), 5 grams of marijuana (around four joints), 50 milligrams of heroin or 40 mg of methamphetamine.

At the end of August, Argentina’s supreme court did something even bolder: It ruled that, under the Argentine constitution, “Each adult is free to make lifestyle decisions without the intervention of the state,” and dismissed a case against youths who had been arrested for possessing a few joints.

In an ideal world, this ruling would have a powerful resonance in the United States, whose constitution also restricts the right of the federal government to meddle in citizens’ private affairs. It took a constitutional amendment to enable the U.S. Congress to prohibit alcohol in 1919 (and another amendment to end alcohol Prohibition in 1933), so who gave Congress the right to criminalize other recreational drugs nationwide by the Controlled Substances Act of 1970? Nobody — and the U.S. Supreme Court has yet to rule on the issue.

A million Americans a year go to jail for “crimes” that hurt nobody but themselves. A vast criminal empire has grown up to service the American demand for drugs. Over the decades hundreds of thousands of people have been killed in the turf wars between the gangs, the police-dealer shootouts and the daily thousands of muggings and burglaries committed by addicts trying to raise money to pay the hugely inflated prices that prohibition makes possible.

Most users of illegal drugs are not addicts, let alone dangerous criminals. Legalization and regulation, on the pattern of alcohol and tobacco, would avoid thousands of violent deaths each month and millions of needlessly ruined lives each year, although psychoactive drug use would still take its toll from the vulnerable and the unlucky, just as alcohol and tobacco do.

But there is little chance that American voters will choose to end this longest of all American wars any time soon, even though its casualties far exceed those of any other American war since 1945. The “War on Drugs” will not end in the United States until a very different generation comes to power.

Elsewhere, however, it is coming to an end much sooner, and one can imagine a time when the job of the history books will be to explain how this berserk aberration ever came about. A large part of the explanation will then focus on the man who started the war, Richard Nixon — so let us get ahead of the mob and focus on him now.

We can do that because of the famous Nixon tapes that recorded almost every word of his presidency. It turns out that he started the war on drugs because he believed that they were a Jewish plot. We know this because researcher Doug McVay from Common Sense on Drug Policy, a Washington-based NGO, went through the last batch of tapes when they became available in 2002 and found Nixon speaking to his aides as follows:

“You know, it’s a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana is Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists.”

Nixon had much more to say about this, but one should not conclude that he was a single-minded anti-Semite. He was an equal-opportunity paranoid who believed that homosexuals, Communists and Catholics were also plotting to undermine America by pushing drugs at it.

“Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no… . You see, homosexuality, dope, uh, immorality in general: These are the enemies of strong societies. That’s why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing it. They’re trying to destroy us.”

The reason for this 39-year war, in other words, is that President Richard Nixon believed that he was facing a “Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope” conspiracy, as Washington Post writer Gene Weingarten put it in a gloriously deadpan article in 2002. But that is just plain wrong. As subsequent developments have shown, it is actually a Jew-homo-doper-Commie-shrink-lefty-pope-LATINO conspiracy. Source.