Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I think your point is well taken, but it raises the question of whether or not mandating incarceration for people who are addicts to drugs and are therefore convicted of drug offences is somehow going to prevent the kind of global trafficking you are talking about.
If we're concerned about the fact that people are being killed in other countries because of the drug trade because we buy drugs here, it doesn't seem to me that it follows necessarily that mandating incarceration of people is going to solve that problem. We only have to look at the experience in the United States, where for many years now there have been mandatory sentences of incarceration for drugs, and yet obviously the drug problem in the U.S. continues. In fact, it has increased, notwithstanding those sentences, so that they now incarcerate more non-violent drug offenders than any other place in the world.
It doesn't seem to me that it makes sense to keep going down that road. If in fact we could use funds to not put people who have addictions in prison, where we know there are exaggerated health risks, but were actually to invest in things like better treatment programs, that to me seems an opportunity cost we can't avoid grappling with.