Thank you, Mr. Chair.
I've taught drug policy at the University of Ottawa for almost a decade. I've worked in the field for over 20 years. I was the first chair of the Law Reform Commission of Canada's drug policy group. I'm one of the founders of the Canadian Foundation for Drug Policy. I've worked in this field for a while.
I want to start with a quote from a 35-year-old African American man talking about his drug use as a younger man. He said:
You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. If the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bullshit and cheap moralism.
That man called himself a junkie and a pothead. He said he was a confused teenager. He also went on to become the President of the United States, Barack Obama. It's ironic to see so many of the politicians on Parliament Hill salivating at the prospect of being seen in the presence of this man when under this law he would in all likelihood have been condemned to a two-year mandatory minimum prison sentence because he used cocaine. As you know, under the current drug law, even just passing a joint or passing a powder to a friend, not selling it, is considered trafficking. That can also probably be said of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, both of whom have admitted their past drug use. Is this not a bit hypocritical?
Eighty percent of the students in the last course I taught last fall had used illegal drugs. Are they honestly criminals? Probably about 10% of my class have committed an offence that would get them a mandatory two-year minimum sentence under this proposed bill. Is that really what we want for our society? This makes no sense whatsoever to me.
We have had 100 years of failed drug policy in this country, and I'm non-partisan in my remarks. The two governments that have presided over drug policy happen to have been the Liberal and Conservative governments in this country, so my criticisms are directed at them. We've had 100 years of a policy that hasn't worked.
Let's remember that every drug harm that we see in this country today occurred under a system of prohibition. The problems with heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and LSD occurred under a system of prohibition. I ask myself why we are taking a policy that has clearly not worked. We've seen the example of the United States where they have used the policy of prohibition to an even greater extent. Why are we taking a policy that hasn't worked and profess to want to do more of it?
I recall from reading the transcript of a previous hearing with the Minister of Justice when Ms. Davies asked the Minister of Justice whether there was any evidence to support mandatory minimums. Ms. Davies asked if he had evidence. The honourable minister replied they had the evidence that Canadians had told them that.
We need better evidence to support policies than the passive views of the Canadian public, which has often, unfortunately, been misinformed by politicians, governments, and groups in this country.
This government pretends to be concerned about violence, drugs, and organized crime, but it has studiously ignored how drug prohibition--not drugs alone, but drugs that have been prohibited--has increased and promoted gun and gang violence in this country. They have enriched and empowered organized crime in this country. The RCMP has consistently reported in recent years that the principal source of income for most criminal organizations in Canada is the drug trade--that is, the drug trade fostered by prohibition, and that is the only reason.
I brought some diagrams. I'm the last speaker, so I thought I'd give you pictures rather than notes.
If you look at this last slide you'll see a very simple explanation of the economics of prohibition. These are figures from the United Nations in the mid-1990s published in The Economist magazine in 2001. They show how a farmer in Pakistan was getting about $90 per kilo of opium at that time, and the price has gone down now as there's such a glut of opium on the market. It takes 10 kilos of opium to make a kilo of heroin. The farm-gate price, what it costs to pay a Pakistani farmer to provide enough opium to make a kilo of heroin, was about $900. By the time that kilo was sold at the retail level in the United States it was worth $290,000. That is a 32,000% increase in profit.
I'm getting about 0.4% on my bank account right now, on my GIC. This 32,000% profit looks pretty good.
This is purely the product of our decision to criminalize these drugs. Prohibition creates a fantastically lucrative black market. The laws of economics are far more powerful than any law this Parliament can enact. These are the same laws of economics that applied during the prohibition of alcohol. Those laws have not changed, even though our criminal laws have.
I also wanted to point out, going through the same images, that I became involved in drug policy work just after this editorial from The Economist magazine came out. The Economist is one of the most respected and conservative current affairs publications in the English-speaking world. In April 1988 they published a lead editorial called “Getting gangsters out of drugs”. Their solution? Legalize, control, discourage. In other words, regulate and discourage.
In 2000 they came out with an article asking if this was really the way to win the war on drugs. Are military efforts in other countries a way to win the war on drugs? The answer was no. I'll just give you a little hint there.
In 1993 they came out with this lead editorial called “Bring drugs within the law”.
In 2001 they did a major survey on drugs called “The case for legalizing drugs”. Again, their position: legalize, control, discourage.
Less than two months ago they came out again. The Economist magazine, again, one of the most respected and conservative publications in the English-speaking world, came out calling for an end to criminal prohibition of drugs. Exactly the opposite of what this bill is doing.
The National Review in 1996—a very conservative, Republican publication—came out calling for an end to prohibition.
In 2002 the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, chaired by Senator Pierre Claude Nolin, a Conservative senator, came out with a report calling for the legalization and regulation of cannabis. This report, you will remember, was adopted unanimously by the Senate of Canada.
There we go.
We have a lot of opinions. You may not believe me. You may not want to listen to me, but I think there are other organizations you could listen to.
It's hard to imagine drug policies that could be worse than the policies we have enacted in this country over the past century. I thought it was hard to imagine that until, of course, this bill came along. We took a bad situation and made it even worse. Mandatory minimum penalties will not work. Drugs are a health issue. They are a social issue. Throwing people in jail is a failure to think about how to deal with drugs. There's not really much point in dealing with the niceties of this bill. I didn't come here to talk about the specifics of the provisions of this bill because I think the bill is so fundamentally flawed, because of its prohibitionist foundation. There's no point in really talking about it. It's a bit like talking about the merits of Aspirin for somebody who has multiple organ failure. Prohibition of drugs is that multiple organ failure. This bill is Aspirin. This is not going to work.
I urge you to reconsider this bill. I urge you to drop this bill and have an honest look at drug policy in this country. Many of the people at this table have worked for decades to try to get a more rational discussion of drug policy in this country. We realize the problems that politicians have in discussing drug policy openly. We're trying to make it safer for you to talk about those things. We're trying to go ahead and help the public understand the reality of drug policy so that politicians can afford to dip their toes in the water and talk about alternatives to this currently failed system of prohibition. We'll continue to do that, but it's very difficult to work with something like this.
Thank you.