This happened a couple of days ago now and we’re only just now getting around to blogging it, but we’re very excited to tell you that This Magazine has been nominated for three National Magazine Awards. Industry awards can be pretty inside-baseball, but this is an excellent opportunity to highlight a few of our many hardworking contributors who are receiving some special recognition from their journalist peers with these nominations. And it’s a chance for you to catch up on some of the compelling articles we published in 2009. The full list of nominees is available at the National Magazine Awards Foundation’s website, and we’d also like to give our congratulations to our fellow nominated small and independent magazines, including Geist, The Walrus, Maisonneuve, Spacing, Prefix Photo, Taddle Creek, AlbertaViews, The Ryerson Review of Journalism, Briarpatch, and Border Crossings (among others).

Here are the This nominees (drumroll please):

Katie Addleman was nominated in the Health & Medicine category for her feature story on drug legalization, “Addicted to failure” (which was a keystone of last November’s Legalize Everything! issue).

Morgan Dunlop was nominated in the Best New Writer category for “Gimme shelter,” her feature on undocumented migrants living in church sanctuary in Canada, and the work of those faith communities to reform our cumbersome immigration policies.

And illustrator Graham Roumieu was nominated in the “spot illustration” category (an illustration smaller than a full page) for this cheeky scene that accompanied Darryl Whetter’s column on the lack of sex in CanLit. Note that Graham is nominated four times in this category for three different publications. He’s a busy guy.

*Graham Roumieu may not be exactly as pictured.

Members of the Vibe Collective in the CIUT studios. From Left: Corey Dawkins, Chantelle Jaime, Michael Richard Lewis AKA Reality Architect, Jamaias DaCosta AKA Jams

We’ve done something a little different with Listen to This #008, bringing you a special hour-long conversation between several This Magazine contributors and Toronto’s Vibe Collective, a group of broadcasters who do a weekly mix of talk and music on CIUT 89.5 FM (available anywhere, anytime, at ciut.fm). Interviewers Jamaias DaCosta and Chantelle Jaime welcomed some writers who contributed to our November-December 2009 issue, “Legalize Everything,” on to the show to talk about the different legalization measures they had written about: Katie Addleman on legalizing drugs, Tim Falconer on assisted suicide, and Laura Kusisto on hate speech. This editor Graham F. Scott (uh, that’s me) was also there to chime in on the origins of the special issue and some of the thorny topics it tackled. It’s a lively, challenging conversation about some really fascinating topics. Running to one full hour, it’s longer than one of our usual podcasts, but we thought it was worth running the conversation in its entirety. The talk took place in mid-January 2010. Hope you enjoy it.

The evidence in favour of safe-injection sites is overwhelming, but the federal government appears determined to shut Insite down.

Despite ongoing efforts by the Harper government to shut it down, Insite, the Vancouver-based supervised-injection site, is alive and thriving, with over 10,000 registered users and around 800 daily visitors. To Mark Townsend, an Insite representative, it’s a success story that needs to be replicated in other cities.

Established in 2003 as a scientific research project to help marginalized populations struggling with addiction, mental illness, and HIV/AIDS in Vancouver’s notorious Downtown Eastside, Insite operates under a constitutional exemption from federal drug laws and is the only legal supervised-injection site in North America.

Since its inception, Insite has been subject to rigorous, independent third-party research that has lead to highly positive articles in publications ranging from the New England Journal of Medicine [PDF] to The Lancet [PDF]. Results have been nearly unanimous: Insite improves health access for the highest-risk users, reduces costs to the health care system, decreases crime, and improves neighbourhoods.

For Townsend, it is a testament to the narrow-minded, ideology-driven policies of the Harper government that it is still trying to have the courts rule Insite a violation of federal criminal drug law.

The latest round of court battles started in May 2008, after the B.C. Supreme Court issued a landmark decision—that it would be a violation of the charter rights to life, liberty, and security of person for addicts not to have access to harm reduction in the form of a safe-injection site. It is this ruling that the federal government is currently appealing; there is no word yet on when a decision will be made. [UPDATE: The B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed the challenge on January 15, 2010; the government indicated it would appeal to the Supreme Court.]

Townsend is hopeful, though, that Insite will survive both its current battle in the B.C. Appeal Court and the inevitable future showdown in the federal Supreme Court. Still, in light of the government’s intransigence, Townsend insists that what is needed now is more action from Insite’s supporters: the best way to fight for the future of safe-injection sites is, where appropriate, to set up more.

“People need to stop talking, get off their asses, and actually do something,” he says with frustration, remembering how Insite immediately transformed Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside for the better.

Illustration by Dushan Milic.

Unrepentant on the eve of his extradition, B.C.’s Prince of Pot has one message: he’ll be back

Marc Emery, Vancouver’s famous marijuana activist, has been sentenced to five years’ imprisonment in the United States in a negotiated deal relating to his mail-order business that sold marijuana seeds throughout North America. We caught up with him a few weeks before he left for prison.

This: You’ve just finished a farewell tour. What do you think it accomplished?

Emery: The great thing is that it validated my connection with the people of this country. I went to 28 different cities and many of them small-town places like Swift Current, Saskatchewan, and Owen Sound, Ontario. I was most popular in small areas with RCMP jurisdictions because they’re used to being oppressed. I constantly pointed out that we have the largest per capita cannabis consumption in the world at 16 percent, or one in six. We are a cannabis-consuming nation.

This: What’s your current state of mind?

Emery: I feel great. I’ve been to jail often enough. I’ve been arrested 23 times for marijuana alone and civil disobedience. And I’ve been jailed 18 times, so I’ve got lots of experience with the criminal justice system. I know that to survive jail the biggest enemy is boredom. Fortunately I like to write. I wrote a lot and read a lot last time I was in jail, in the Saskatoon Correctional Centre. I got three months for passing one joint. I was the head janitor for the administration centre for the people working there. So scrubbing toilets and floors and walls was very therapeutic and allowed me a lot of quality thinking time. Typically I get involved in the prison routines. I organized the card tournaments on the weekend. And that’s what you have to do to make the time go by.

This: Do you have any idea of where you will serve your time?

Emery: No, but most Canadians end up in alien prisons throughout the United States. For example, there are nine Canadians in the penitentiary in California City but there are 1,000 Mexicans, Guatemalans, Hondurans, and people who are illegals there. And, unfortunately for the Canadians, it’s somewhat frightening because a lot of the Mexicans are in gangs and they have gang battles inside the federal prisons. The Canadians are kind of outnumbered linguistically and otherwise, so it’s typically a very lonely time for Canadians in a jail. Because normally a person like me, whose most serious infraction is mailing out seeds, I would be put on a work camp and given the lowest possible security assignment. But because I’m an alien I’m not qualified to have that. So Canadians tend to have a much harsher environment than Americans in the U.S. federal penitentiary system.

This: Do you know for certain how much time you’ll end up spending in the U.S. system?

Emery: My five years that we agreed upon would end up being four years and three months before I got deported back to Canada. It used to be Canadians would get prison transfers between six months to a year, except the Conservative government is no longer taking back drug prisoners. Hopefully if the government changes and if there’s a Liberal government, the old system would become automatic again.

This: Have you spoken to Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff?

Emery: I’ve spoken to his people and they assure me they’d get me back as soon as possible.

This: Do you have any fear about going to jail?

Emery: No. I’m going to be the most famous name in any prison anywhere in America. So if something bad happens to me, everybody will hear about it. I’m not going to get intimidated into not complaining if it’s crappy. I have minimal needs. I’m a vegetarian so I want decent food. Fresh vegetables and fresh fruit at the very least. And I don’t mind going on a hunger strike for food, and if they put me in isolation or force-feed me, people will know what happens to me day by day. I’ve got millions of supporters throughout North America and there’s no one else in the U.S. federal system that’s going to be able to say that. So if they punish or torture me, people will know what happens to me. And that will make the Bureau of Prisons sensitive, I presume, if they have any political smarts at all.

Your $5 cover includes a copy of the magazine, and we’ll be selling discounted subscriptions as well. Our friends from the Dominion News Cooperative will be on hand selling copies of their extra-special Olympic Issue, and we’ll even have a representative of the Pirate Party of Canada there if you’d like to chat with them about their platforms and positions. (Also note that another of our small-magazine compatriots, Upping the Anti: A Journal of Theory and Action, are having their own launch party the same night just up the street, in case you’d like to hit two events in one night, you party animal you.) Hope to see you Thursday!

What: This Magazine Legalize Everything Party
When: Thursday, November 19, 2009, 7 p.m.
Where: The Painted Lady, 218 Ossington Avenue, Toronto

Legalize Everything! party sponsors:

The fight for free speech is not the work of angels. Academics love Evelyn Hall’s famous saying, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” In the age of promiscuous online speech, the sentiment of two university protestors seems more apt: “Free speech for all. Even douchebags.”

Marc Lemire, the cherubic-faced webmaster of white supremacist Freedomsite, is the latest unpalatable hero in the fight to fix Canada’s hate speech laws. On September 2, the Canadian Human Rights Commission vice-chairperson, Athanasios Hadjis, acquitted Lemire of hate speech charges for comments on the site accusing gays of conspiring to spread AIDS. Hadjis also declared the Section 13 hate speech provisions of Canada’s Human Rights Act unconstitutional. The decision is not legally binding. But it should be.

In addition to Canada’s rarely applied criminal laws against hate speech, human-rights commissions have had the authority to prosecute hate speech since 1977. This was expanded to include internet-based hate in 2001. The tribunal has a staggeringly low burden of proof compared to most legal proceedings; for instance, it’s easier to prosecute someone for hate speech than it is for libel. And until Lemire’s case, no one had ever been acquitted of hate speech by the CHRC, a record that would be scandalous for any other court. It puts Canada at odds with the hate speech laws of most other nations. It also puts us at odds with our own values.

We protect religion and equality because we recognize that these freedoms make individuals’ lives better. But we protect expression because unfettered dissent is the only way to protect democracy. When a government official sits across from conservative blogger Ezra Levant in a 25-square-foot conference room and asks him to explain his decision to publish the infamous Danish Mohammed cartoons, she is asking a single citizen to justify his political beliefs before the power of the state. Levant may be a blowhard, but that scenario should give everyone—left, right, whatever—serious pause.

The stated reason for upholding hate speech laws is that they protect minorities from greater harm. Or, as Bernie Farber, CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, ominously puts it:, “Racist war, from the ethnic cleansing in Cambodia, to the Balkans, to Darfur, to the Holocaust, did not start in a vacuum. Hateful words do have an effect.” We need a better justification than comparing ourselves to far-flung genocidal regimes. In Canada, we already prosecute rare hate-based assaults, murder, and yes, genocide. Hate speech laws punish people for creating the mere potential for violence, even though violence rarely materializes.

Even if hate speech rarely leads to violence, it is true that it demoralizes minorities and threatens tolerance. After anti-Islamic comments by Levant and Maclean’s columnist Mark Steyn made headlines, a poll found that 45 percent of Canadians believe Islam promotes hatred and violence. The CHRC is right to worry about this kind of view taking hold. But trying to ban speech, especially on the internet, only gives it wings. When Levant posted the videos of his CHRC hearings to YouTube they received over 500,000 hits, and clips were featured on numerous mainstream media programs.

The (re)legalization of hate speech would be difficult and unpalatable. But we don’t have to approve of what the douchebags say—we just have to let them say it.

Today in our ongoing saga of legalization initiatives, Rosemary Counter talks to Canada’s pre-eminent outlaw milk farmer (not that there are too many of them jostling for the top position), Michael Schmidt. Schmidt believes that Canadians should be able to drink unpasteurized milk if they want to, and that it’s actually better for you; Health Canada says otherwise, and warns consumers that raw milk can be harmful to your health. Let us know where you stand by voting in today’s poll at right.

Here’s Schmidt’s take:

Despite what Schmidt wants you to think, says [Dairy spokesman] Bill Mitchell, this is not a dairy industry issue, it’s a health issue: “A guy from an unlicensed farm selling unpasteurized milk in mason jars he washes by hand is an outbreak waiting to happen.”

For others still, whether raw milk is safe or not, it’s a basic human right for informed consumers to choose what they eat. “People should not think this is a milk issue,” says Schmidt. “It happened to be milk in my case, but the real problem is the government infringing on people’s rights.”

Read the full article here.

Tomorrow: Laura Kusisto on hate speech

Despite numerous guilty verdicts, rogue milk farmer Michael Schmidt will not back down. He will not pay the $55,000 in fines, and he won’t cease selling his illegal product. “It will go to the next level,” he explains in his thick German accent. “Appeal Court, Supreme Court; I might as well go.”

If Schmidt seems unrepentant, it’s because he’s guilty: for years, he’s been distributing raw unpasteurized milk to 200 local families from his small Durham, Ont., farm in a quasi-legal cow-share operation, where customers literally buy the cow and get the milk for free. This violates the 1938 Milk Act, which made the selling of raw milk illegal in Canada (the only G8 country to do so). But with the new popularity of the green and organic movements, publicity and sales “going up a lot,” Schmidt is no longer flying under the radar.

The Ministry of Health immediately released a stern statement following a 2006 raid on Schmidt’s farm: “Make no mistake about it—drinking unpasteurized milk is not good for you.” Raw milk can carry salmonella, E. coli, and listeria, they say, citing 117 cases of enteric illness associated with unpasteurized dairy in Ontario since 2005. Disease-causing bacteria can cause many transmissible diseases, including “mild illnesses, long-lasting serious diseases, and even death.”

But for Schmidt’s customers, raw milk is a superior product being crushed by a monopolizing dairy lobby. They believe pasteurization—the process of blasting milk at 72°C for 15 seconds to kill bacteria—also eliminates healthy antibodies, natural enzymes, and vitamins. Advocates say it’s good for people with lactose intolerance, and can even calm symptoms of attention deficit disorder. Plus, it’s delicious: “It’s richer, sweeter, not so watery,” says Schmidt. “It’s what milk’s supposed to taste like.”

“He’s a great marketer,” says Bill Mitchell, spokesperson for the Dairy Farmers of Ontario. Mitchell has a 20-year history with the farmer, including Schmidt’s claim he was ignored when he offered to work with the dairy industry to produce safe raw milk. Despite what Schmidt wants you to think, says Mitchell, this is not a dairy industry issue, it’s a health issue: “A guy from an unlicensed farm selling unpasteurized milk in mason jars he washes by hand is an outbreak waiting to happen.”

For others still, whether raw milk is safe or not, it’s a basic human right for informed consumers to choose what they eat. “People should not think this is a milk issue,” says Schmidt. “It happened to be milk in my case, but the real problem is the government infringing on people’s rights.” Schmidt filed a challenge under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms in June.

Somewhere between every Canadian’s right to consumption and absolute prohibition is the only workable solution: an effective system of regulating raw milk (and its defiant producers like Schmidt, who will surely sell it anyway). For informed consumers who know its real risks—not just its lore of benefits—legal raw milk should be nothing to cry over.

Our (totally made up, unofficial) Legalization Week continues today with Katie Addleman’s exploration of the drug trade, and the catastrophic effect prohibition has had on law enforcement, gang violence, addicts’ health, and community safety:

Ounce for ounce, marijuana is worth more than gold, and heroin more than uranium. Yet it’s only as a direct result of international policy that drugs are so valuable; if they weren’t illegal, they’d be worthless. Prohibition floats the drug trade by raising potential profits to astronomical levels, and the drug trade in turn floats the gangs who control it. “Because of … their illegality and associated criminal sanctions,” writes Chettleburgh, “those willing to trade in them—drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, so-called narco-terrorist groups and street gangs—can demand high prices and derive great profits.”

“You’re talking about a profession where people accept a risk of being murdered, execution-style, as an occupational hazard,” said Bratzer. “How is a mandatory minimum sentence going to deter a person who already accepts the risk of being shot and having their body dumped in a car?”

Read the article in full here. And be sure to vote in our poll on drug policy above, too.

Tomorrow: Rosemary Counter on raw milk.

Shortly after Vancouver was named the host of the 2010 Olympics, Naomi Klein was seething about injustice again. “The Vancouver-Whistler Olympic bid presented the province of British Columbia as a model of harmonious, sustainable living, a place where everyone gets along,” she wrote in 2003. After 9-11, the city had sold itself to the International Olympic Committee as the “Safety and Security Candidate…a place where nothing ever happens.” It was a false image, and Klein feared that the darker realities of life in B.C. would remain unexposed to the international community. She needn’t have worried. Six years later, just as the world was turning an eye on Vancouver in advance of the coming Olympic carnival, the city was full of guns. The murder rate between January and March was unprecedented: 47 shootings, 19 of them fatal—twice as many as five years previous. The U.K.’s Sunday Times ran an article calling Vancouver “Murder City.” Vancouver police chief Jim Chu summed up the situation for a panicking public: “There is a gang war, and it’s brutal.”

The UN Office on Drugs and Crime released its 2009 World Drug Report in late June, naming the west coast of Canada as a hub of the international drug trade and B.C.’s organized crime groups as largely responsible. By this time, the violence had died down and not much attention was paid to connecting this new information about B.C.’s pivotal role in world drug traffic and the war that Chu had identified three months earlier. The link between gang warfare, the manufacture and export of illicit drugs, and the fact of those drugs’ very illegality was, meanwhile, barely mentioned at all.

After years of attacking the symptoms of the (increasingly ludicrously named) “war on drugs,” it’s time to stop and consider what would actually end the murders, gang wars, smuggling, petty arrests, and drug-related deaths that afflict us. The answer is to attack the root of the problem: prohibition itself.

In October 2007, six men were found dead in an apartment in the Vancouver neighbourhood of Surrey. The 48 investigators charged with solving the crime appealed to the public and the victims’ families, asking for any information that could lead to arrests. It was obvious to everyone that four of these six murders weren’t random. The two remaining victims had been caught in the crossfire and killed accidentally. These were executions. Vancouver had long supported a substantial criminal economy, but the case of the Surrey Six marked the beginning of a precipitous rise in gang-related violence. In the months that followed, the headlines of local papers became increasingly macabre; by the time I arrived in Vancouver at the end of 2008, I felt I’d landed in Gotham City: Three Slayings Within 24 Hours, the papers screamed; Man Gunned Down in East Vancouver; Grieving Mom Begs for Public’s Help; Four Fatal Shootings Lead Cops to Expect More. At the beginning of 2009, one year before the Olympics would make Vancouver the focus of every news outlet in the world, people were being shot on a nearly daily basis.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper responded with the hardline approach typical of conservative politics: more convictions, longer sentences. The proposed legislation called for more of the same, its coup de grâce being a mandate that all gang-related killings be called first-degree murder and carry minimum jail terms of 25 years. Harper announced his proposal in Vancouver at the end of February, affecting a “we’ll take care of it” demeanour that aimed to calm the public and the international media, who were now swarming on the story of Gangland Vancouver. There was nothing to worry about, he said. The escalating violence shouldn’t concern those planning to attend the 2010 Olympic Games. (They’d install 15,000 police officers, working morning to night!) Later that day, Cory Stephen Konkin, 30, was shot in his car in Maple Ridge. He was followed by four more murder victims in the five days that followed.

“They have to appear to be doing something,” says Jerry Paradis of the Harper government’s fledgling recourse. “They can’t just admit they are at a loss on how to deal with the issue.” Paradis, who served as a judge on the Provincial Court of British Columbia between 1975 and 2003, has become an outspoken critic of governments’ law and order policies, and particularly their proven ineffectiveness in preventing gang violence. He points to the various “task forces” that have been created and re-created over the years as examples of this failure—when one proves ineffectual, it is replaced by another that looks remarkably similar: the Integrated Gang Task Force, implemented in 2004, was followed in 2007 by the Violence Suppression Team. The violence not having been suppressed, Premier Gordon Campbell is now allocating funds to identical squads in Kelowna and Prince George, to be developed over the next three years at a cost of $23 million per year.

Paradis points to the failed anti-gang measures of the United States, which bear a strong resemblance to those our own government would adopt. “The federal and many state penal systems that adopted mandatory minimums are withdrawing from that approach,” he says. “In California, devotion to quick-fix measures like three-strikes laws and widespread minimums have nearly bankrupted the government, while having no perceptible effect on crime.”

Why do we continually fall back on tactics that don’t work? Aside from the share of votes garnered through “tough on crime” posturing, gangs are exceedingly problematic to combat. “Their airtight culture, their shifting alliances, and, most important, the fear they spread make gangs exceedingly difficult to successfully investigate and prosecute,” says Paradis. “Surveillance, infiltration, and intelligence seem to be the keys—and those can be extremely delicate and costly.” No government in the world has the resources necessary to quash gang activity through these conventional means. Policy makers need to put on their creative thinking caps, and then ready themselves for a revolution. The solution to the problem— legalization—is nothing if not divisive.

The concentration of violence was unprecedented in Vancouver. But gang violence is nothing new; gangs are volatile entities, their hierarchies often disrupted by death or imprisonment, their members sensitive to power fluctuations occurring in like organizations all over the globe. When a cartel boss flaps his wings in Mexico City, a typhoon of violence can erupt in Surrey, B.C. According to a study on organized crime in British Columbia prepared by the RCMP’s Criminal Analysis Section in 2005, as of that year there were 108 street gangs operating in B.C. Today’s estimates place the number higher, at 160. And it will continue to rise; there’s money enough to support hundreds of these organizations. It’s not hard to turn a dime when you’re invested in the world’s most lucrative market.

Michael C. Chettleburgh, a criminal policy consultant in Ottawa and Canada’s foremost authority on street gangs, posits that gang life offers various attractions—camaraderie, protection, a shared sense of identity, power—but that the opportunity to make vast amounts of money is undoubtedly its primary allure. “The desire for money and the desire to make money quickly, by whatever means possible, are the combined drivers of street-gang activity,” he writes. Street gangs derive their income from myriad illegal activities, but selling drugs is far and away their greatest profit source. (Studies conducted by the RCMP, CSIS, and the Fraser Institute, among others, consistently produce findings to this effect.) Though the worth of any black market is impossible to calculate exactly, the UN puts the yearly value of the worldwide drug trade at somewhere between US$150 and US$400 billion. That’s one-eighth of the world’s international trade, according to UN studies. Only the textile industry yields similar gains.

“This kind of gang violence is always very cyclical,” Const. David Bratzer told me in the measured, helpful tone of a schoolteacher, when I reached him at his home in Victoria and asked for his take on the current crisis. “It’s related to control of the black market for drugs. A lot of times, when you see this kind of violence, it’s because something has been destabilized: a leader’s been arrested or shot, and now his subordinates or other groups are fighting to control that black market and all those tax-free profits.” Whether violence is up or down at a given moment is inconsequential; it will continue to rise and abate in endless waves as long as there are gangs, and there will be gangs as long as organized crime is profitable.

Still, in the early months of 2009, politicians and police were compelled to offer more pointed explanations for the latest explosion. Most spoke broadly of internal power struggles or disruptions to the drug supply, while some, like RCMP Supt. Pat Fogarty, placed the blame squarely on the ongoing Mexican drug war. None of this reasoning is invalid, but it skirts the larger truth: people were dying, and killing, for money. Or, more accurately, enough money to buy a country.

Ounce for ounce, marijuana is worth more than gold, and heroin more than uranium. Yet it’s only as a direct result of international policy that drugs are so valuable; if they weren’t illegal, they’d be worthless. Prohibition floats the drug trade by raising potential profits to astronomical levels, and the drug trade in turn floats the gangs who control it. “Because of … their illegality and associated criminal sanctions,” writes Chettleburgh, “those willing to trade in them—drug cartels, organized crime syndicates, so-called narco-terrorist groups and street gangs—can demand high prices and derive great profits.”

Great profits is an understatement. Everything in the drug trade is profit. Manufacturers, who buy from farmers, incur virtually no overhead. They’re buying plants—weeds, in fact— that will grow nearly anywhere. From the point of production to the point of purchase, the value of their product can increase by as much as 17,000 percent. By contrast, the markup on retail goods is generally closer to 100 percent. This is what Canada, and all other governments who support prohibition policy, fail to grasp: drug dealing is a profession, and its potential earnings guarantee an endless supply of hopeful employees. Harsher criminal penalties haven’t stopped it, and won’t stop it, because the number of dealers will never diminish. Locking up one doesn’t remove one from the street; it creates a job opening that hundreds of people are waiting to fill. In his wildest imaginings, Stephen Harper could not envision an effective deterrent to this fact.

“You’re talking about a profession where people accept a risk of being murdered, execution-style, as an occupational hazard,” said Bratzer. “How is a mandatory minimum sentence going to deter a person who already accepts the risk of being shot and having their body dumped in a car?”

In British Columbia, the marijuana trade alone accounts for five percent of the GDP, placing it alongside forestry and mining in economic significance. It employs 250,000 people and is worth $7 billion annually. Police have busted thousands of grow-ops in eradication campaigns over the past 10 years, finding particular success with the Electric Fire Safety Initiative, a four-year-old project that partners B.C. Hydro with the fire department and the RCMP to track down growops through notable spikes in private electricity usage. Yet the industry continues to thrive. The number of plants in B.C. is actually proliferating; the RCMP estimates there are currently 20,000 province-wide. The webpage of the City of Richmond, B.C., includes helpful hints for landlords wishing to prevent their properties from becoming marijuana farms.

The Criminal Intelligence Service of British Columbia confirms “marijuana cultivation is the most pervasive and lucrative organized crime activity” in the province, but goes on to remind us that local methamphetamine production is nothing to pooh-pooh; it’s making a strong push to the top, “expanding at a rate similar to the early growth of the marijuana industry.” It’s little wonder that the province can support so many gangs.

And while, in Chettleburgh’s words, Canadians demonstrate a “robust interest” in consuming illicit drugs (a 2004 study by the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse leaves little room for interpretation), it must be noted that 90 to 95 percent of the illegal drugs produced in Canada are eventually sold in external markets. This is not unique to Canada, but representative of the trade. The drug market is borderless, and links every crime ring in the world to every other: grow-ops in Canada are guarded by American guns, which are sold to Canadians to finance purchases of cocaine, which is sold to Mexicans by Colombian manufacturers, and then ferried across the border by American importers, who trade it with Canadians for B.C.-grown marijuana, who sell it for guns to protect their growops, ad infinitum. Variations on the model are unlimited; supply lines and products traded change along with profit margins, power structures, and government patrol barriers. What remains constant is a competitive economic system, controlled by people under immense pressure and concerned only with profit potential. Violence is the natural by-product of such a system—in Vancouver, in Phoenix, in Ciudad Juarez. It is a global problem.

Jack Cole is the executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, an international organization comprised of police chiefs and officers, former mayors and governors, criminal justice policy experts, MPs, retired senators and judges, and the former attorney general of Colombia, among others. Its mandate is to legitimize a fringe position on drug policy: legalize. Legalize everything.

“I’d say this is about business as usual,” Cole said of the violence raging from Mexico to Canada. We had finally gotten the chance to speak; Cole travels endlessly for LEAP, within the U.S. and internationally, presenting to professional, civic, religious, and governing bodies, including the UN, on the proven dangers of prohibition and the necessity of ending it. He estimates that he has given his speech, “End Prohibition Now,” more than 800 times. The International Harm Reduction Association selected it as one of the world’s finest documents on policing and harm reduction. Our conversation had been preceded by numerous emails. The last one, genial as always, concluded, “Attached are some of the things that would not exist if we had legalized regulation of drugs.” I opened the attachment. It was an article from a recent issue of the London Telegraph. “Henchman of Mexican Drug Lord Dissolved 300 Bodies in Acid,” read the headline. I didn’t read any further. Cole’s position was clear enough.

When we spoke the next day I was surprised by his tone: warm, patient, patently American. It made his pro-legalization talk all the more intriguing. “It was worse than this at given times in the past,” he said. “In Colombia, for instance. Most people weren’t following it, but when you look at the number of people murdered in Colombia back in late ‘80s and early ’90s … I mean, the drug cartels actually attacked the federal courthouse, and for several days held hostages there. They killed a whole bunch of judges.” For all of the apocalyptic talk at the beginning of the year, gang violence was not, internationally, the worst it had been—just the closest to home. “The fact of the matter is, that all this would end, it would all be over within a day, if we legalized and regulated these drugs,” Cole said.

Not everyone agrees. Darryl Plecas, a professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice at the University of Fraser Valley and the RCMP Research Chair in Crime Reduction, argues widely for continued prohibition and prosecution of producers and traffickers. “Things are changing, thanks very much, without a change in policy on prohibition,” he told me when I reached him on the ferry from Vancouver Island to the mainland. “Cocaine, crystal meth—we wiped that problem off the planet. It’s vanished. There were all kinds of people using meth, then there was an all-out assault [by government and law enforcement agencies]. What it takes is clever education.” The UN World Drug Report naming Canada as one of the largest exporters of crystal meth had not yet been released at the time of our conversation.

Plecas, who has twice participated in the prestigious Oxford Round Table, an annual forum on public policy at Oxford University, also takes a moral stance against legalization, arguing the harmful effects of drugs on users and their communities. “Do we want to facilitate, condone that?” he asks. When I put forward the standard argument that marijuana has proven less harmful than alcohol, he responds that there is “mounting medical evidence of the harms of marijuana use. Nobody’s getting schizophrenia from drinking. You can backtrack from alcoholism. You’re not returning from schizophrenia.”

This, in effect, is the centre of the prohibitionists’ argument. Drugs are not just dangerous, but demonic; if they weren’t, it would be very hard to justify their illegality. “People have, to some extent, been hoodwinked by the misinformation put out there by the prohibitionists,” says Jeffrey Miron, a Harvard economist who has been studying the unintended consequences of prohibition for 15 years. “This is the claim that drug use is very, very horribly bad for you, the implication that it’s always and necessarily bad for you, as opposed to the more accurate view that, like alcohol, dose makes a difference and lots of people can use in moderation and use responsibly,” he says. “They don’t seem to want to think about the fact that some people misuse alcohol and do stupid things, but millions of people don’t misuse alcohol and use it in moderation. And they assume that somehow drugs would be different, that we would only get the extreme cases. But the evidence doesn’t suggest that. I don’t know why more people don’t recognize that.”

So while Plecas says prohibitionists “should get their moral compass out,” Miron, Cole, and a growing number of politicians, economists, criminologists and police officers (particularly in the wake of President Obama’s election to the White House, as the new administration is seen as more amenable to logic) are putting forward the idea that legalization represents the most ethical solution to the drug problem. It is founded on a singular fact, irrefutable in the face of a century of gathered evidence: prohibition has made everything worse. From crime to corruption to instances of overdose, prohibition has left us less safe, sicker, and poorer than before, and all at tremendous expense. Governments everywhere have essentially spent billions ramping up social ills. It is one of the hideous ironies of our age.

As drugs and their use predate prohibition, the social implications of the policy can be easily traced. The first instance of anti-drug legislation in Canada was the Anti-Opium Act, passed in 1908. British Columbia was then roughly 20 percent Chinese. One year earlier, an anti-Asian riot had torn through Vancouver, and the practice of placing head taxes on Chinese immigrants, first instituted in 1884, was at its peak. The Anti-Opium Act was plainly born of racist sentiment masquerading as a public safety initiative, as drug use in general was hardly stigmatized during this period. Throughout the Victorian era, one could dabble in cocaine, morphine, and heroin, whether instructed to do so by a doctor or no (physicians regularly prescribed all three), without wandering outside the border of mainstream practice.

In his book Chasing Dragons: Security, Identity, and Illicit Drugs in Canada, author Kyle Grayson writes that “public disapproval of opium arose not from the effects of the drug itself, but rather from its association with a group perceived as biologically and culturally inferior.” Opium was identified with Chinese immigrants and labourers, and, worse than that, with the corruption of white women at the hands of Chinese opium merchants. While other drugs were an acceptable good time, opium was foreign, un-Christian, and threatening. “It is important to remember that the publicly stated rationale for the Opium Act, the legislation that made further acts possible, did not have to do with the potentially harmful effects of opium. Rather, it was based on reports of the narcotic’s ‘dire influence’—specifically, on reports that young white women had been found in an opium den.”

By 1911, as Canadians were first starting to carve out a cultural identity, drug use of all kinds had begun to be seen as “improper,” not “Canadian,” and a symptom of moral deterioration. This new conception, spearheaded by culturally conservative journalists and politicians, led to the Opium and Narcotic Drug Act, a broader version of its predecessor, which included a clause permitting for the later addition of other drugs. In 1923, marijuana made the list. No reason was given. The trend continued, and the production, sale, and consumption of opium, cocaine, heroin, and marijuana were all eventually entirely criminalized, with other narcotics similarly banned as they appeared. The result? Just over 100 years after the misinformed creation of Canada’s first drug law, production is up, usage is up, crime is up, prices and ill-gotten profits are up. Prohibition has had none of its intended effects, and has instead served its targets. There is a kind of poetic justice here: we’ve seen that prohibition was based on a bogus theory, and as befits all ill-founded practices, it failed demonstrably.

The solution is to end it. We’ve lost much to fear campaigns (“Drugs kill!”) and plain delusion (“We can achieve a drug-free world!”), but the population can be re-educated. The majority of the Canadian public already supports legalized marijuana, but a 2009 Angus Reid Strategies poll indicates that only eight percent favour legalization of hard drugs. We are uneasy with the idea of the government supplying the public with drugs; there are too many attendant moral questions. But legalization, though not ideal, remains what the Economist calls the “least bad policy.” The trouble will be getting the public to vocally support it, and finding politicians willing to stand for it. “There has to be some fundamental change in people’s attitudes toward drugs,” says Miron. “It’s not obvious where that change will come from, unless a mainstream politician or a mainstream figure, a respected figure, stands up and says, ‘This policy’s idiotic.’”

Nowhere is the sale and production of drugs a legal activity. Prohibition remains a fact of life in every country in the world, but the decriminalization policies of some places— most notably Switzerland, Portugal, and the Netherlands—are so comprehensive as to give us an idea of what life in a drug-law-free zone might look like. The Swiss have been treating heroin as a health problem since 1994. There were 23 clinics in the country where addicts could go up to three times a day to inject government-supplied heroin in 2007. The drug is provided on a sliding monetary scale. If an addict can pay for it, he or she does; if not, it’s free. The crime rate went down by 60 percent. Portugal shocked the international community and its own citizens when it decriminalized the possession of all drugs in 2001, becoming the first country in Europe to do so. A report published earlier this year by the Cato Institute, a U.S.-based think tank, concluded that the policy change had led to lowered instances of drug trafficking, sexually transmitted diseases, and overdose deaths, and an increase in the number of adults registered in addiction treatment programs. In the Netherlands, where soft drugs have been all but legal since 1976, the per capita usage of marijuana and hash is half what it is the U.S. Studies also suggest that the Netherlands per capita usage of hard drugs and homicide rates are one-quarter less than those of the U.S.

While we don’t have examples of successful legalization to look to, most policy makers, researchers, consultants, and activists envision it as combination of governmental drug production and distribution and harm-reduction initiatives. The government would manufacture the products, standardizing them for purity; supply them to the public in government-operated stores like the LCBO or B.C. Liquor. and use the profits from taxation to treat and ease addiction through rehabilitation programs and safe-injection sites. “There are lots of different ways it could be implemented,” says Miron. “It could be implemented by medicalizing it, meaning change the rules so that medical provision was not much supervised, so doctors could prescribe relatively freely, in which case just as many people can go and get Prozac; if they go to a psychiatrist and act as though they need it, people will be able to go to doctors and say, ‘My back hurts,’ or ‘I have anxiety,’ and be able to get prescriptions for morphine or methadone or marijuana or whatever. But it would still be open to the views of the enforcers about whether or not to allow wide-scale medical distribution. I think the better model is alcohol—sold by private companies, advertised, subject to age restrictions and some taxes, but just a legal commodity like anything else. There’s no reason it has to be treated any differently than Starbucks or Budweiser.”

Whatever the model we choose, drugs cannot continue to be treated as they are. We’ve avoided it as long as possible, but it’s time to look the ethical maze in the mouth and navigate our way through it, because to continue to pretend that we can extricate ourselves from this war through the traditional crime-and-punishment avenues of the Canadian justice system is to continue to line the pockets of those who would slay us in Surrey, if only by accident.