According to the Senate committee, the United Nations international drug control conventions codified arbitrary classifications of illegal drugs that were not supported by science. These conventions made no mention at all of alcohol or tobacco, even though the international community claimed to be curtailing the use of dangerous drugs. Especially with respect to marijuana, the committee said that international conventions represented “an utterly irrational restraint that has nothing to do with scientific or public health considerations.”
Canada’s political response to illegal drugs has been reliably tough on crime for fifty years, with one short-lived legislative attempt to liberalize. Prime Minister Paul Martin’s minority government tabled a timid law in 2004 decriminalizing small amounts of marijuana. Less than fifty grams could attract a fine of up to four hundred dollars, but there would be no criminal record. On the other hand, the law provided for a doubling of sentences for growers. Advocates of more liberal marijuana laws were appalled, saying the new law would be worse than before. Martin’s government fell before Bill C-17 could be passed, but his party in 2012 voted to support a policy of outright legalization.
Since the election of the Conservative government in 2006, though, and up until the time of writing, Prime Minister Harper has taken an extremely hard line on drugs, establishing long mandatory minimum sentences for all illicit drugs, including marijuana, and prosecuting drug laws with renewed vigour. Approaches that stress public health or harm reduction are fought tooth and nail in the face of Supreme Court decisions allowing for the application of these models.
On the one hand, the government has opposed harm-reduction projects like InSite, the safe injection site in Vancouver. On the other hand, having lost its bid to shut InSite down, in 2011 the government endorsed a heroin research project called SALOME (The Study to Assess Longer-term Opioid Medication Effectiveness) in which addicts will be provided with treatment in the form of either heroin or hydromorphone (both are opiates, but the latter is legal).[12]
An earlier project, NAOMI (North American Opiate Management Initiative), had found that methadone (a synthetic opiate) was not as successful as heroin in helping addicts get into treatment, stop taking street drugs, and stop committing crimes to support their habit. For some addicts, therefore, prescribed heroin is the only effective option. However, the Conservative government has a visceral antipathy to providing heroin to heroin addicts under any circumstances for any reason. Hydromorphone is the more palatable alternative for this government, if it can be proved to work, because hydromorphone is, unaccountably, legal.
Researchers say that abstinence from opioids is not a realistic objective when dealing with addicts.[13] The addiction must be recognized as a chronic condition and treated by long-term, maintenance-oriented substitution methods. Methadone, for example, must be provided on a long-term basis. But using methadone to detoxify a user to get him to abstain carries a “really high risk of death.” Abstinence is simply not an option for some users.
Prescribed heroin is commonplace in Europe as a treatment for heroin addiction. The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) said in its 2007 annual report that virtually all nations in the EU provided opioid substitution treatment and needle exchange programs. These programs had increased in number tenfold over ten years.[14]
The evidence accepted by these nations — that prescribed heroin is a proven successful therapy — has so far not been accepted by the Canadian government. The myopia engendered by a tough-on-crime approach to drugs thus has the direct result of endangering the lives of addicts and their friends and families. This is just one illustration of the intransigence of the current government in the face of overwhelming evidence.
High Technology, Designer Drugs, and Old-Fashioned Prescriptions
If we needed further proof that the War on Drugs cannot be won, it lies in the ingenious and continual invention of new synthetic drugs, and in new methods of distribution that better enable dealers to circumvent law enforcement.
One of the most innovative distribution networks to emerge depends upon neither a geographical location nor a physical currency. It is known as the Silk Road, and first came to light in 2011.[15] The Silk Road is an online marketplace (somewhat like eBay) that sells many products, but largely drugs. Law enforcement officials know where to find it online, but until recently they were unable to shut down the drug sales. The Silk Road uses a popular Internet anonymizer tool called “Tor,” which makes it virtually impossible to locate the computers. And it uses the new anonymous, stateless, encrypted online currency called “Bitcoin.”
It took the FBI more than two years to arrest the purveyor of the Silk Road in October 2013.[16] But within one month of Ross Ulbricht’s arrest, a new Silk Road drug bazaar was up and running. The new operator continues to use Tor (which is still safe — Edward Snowden used it when he released information from the National Security Agency in 2013), and has improved the technology so as to keep buyers’ identities secret. Traffickers have thus proved themselves remarkably capable of adapting swiftly to the pressure of law enforcement, as they have in other areas of the drug trade.
Key players in creating the Silk Road say that selling drugs over the Internet is a way of bypassing criminal gangs as it allows people to buy their drugs straight from the producer. Users who buy from the Silk Road say that “the quality is more consistent, the sale is safer, and the experience better than trying to find a street dealer.” Some even claim that the site helps combat addiction by requiring buyers to confirm their intentions and make decisions carefully.
Canadians are among the top buyers and sellers on the Silk Road. Canada places fifth on a list of the twelve most frequent shipping and originating destinations.[17] When asked what law enforcement is doing about the Internet trade, though, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) say simply that they do not monitor anonymous websites.
Drugs are delivered over the Silk Road by the mundane means of private shipping companies or by registered mail, and often arrive in vacuum-sealed bags to avoid drug-sniffer dogs. Elaborate measures are taken by the site to protect its clients, but even so, a handful of users have been arrested in the United States and one was convicted in Australia in 2013. The amount of money changing hands is not yet significant (about $2.21 million in today’s Canadian dollars per month, according to researchers at Carnegie Mellon University),[18] but drug warriors regard it as important to nip this new development in the bud. As cyber security professor Dr. Nicolas Christin says, though, “It’s not a matter of the police locking a few guys up to end this. It is very distributed: we are looking at more than 600 sellers each month.”[19]
One large problem law enforcement faces in trying to put a stop to the Internet drug trade is the human rights issue. It is expected that officials will try to tackle the industry through the vulnerabilities of Bitcoin. However, if Bitcoin were to be banned, bloggers in places like Saudi Arabia and Vietnam — who use Bitcoin to host services on alternative, dissident websites — would be vulnerable. And Tor is a “staple of activists avoiding Internet censorship or government crackdowns the world over, including China, Iran and Syria.” Thus, officials who try to interfere with these technologies in search of drug dealers will also be likely to expose the identities of dissidents, placing their lives in grave danger. In a supreme irony, a large proportion of Tor’s funding comes (indirectly) from the U.S. State Department’s Internet freedom budget.[20]
Another recent trend compels law enforcement to work hard to keep up. This is the determined and perpetual development of a host of new drugs that allow dealers to stay one step ahead of the law. While the latest World Drug Report 2013 says that the world has achieved stability in the use of traditional drugs (meaning mainly heroin, cocaine, and marijuana), it also says there has been an alarming increase in new