On Drug Policy

Alberta in particular continues to ride the “War on Drugs” policy train from the 1980s.  In fact, in many ways the current UCP government has doubled down on it with an approach that basically says “recovery is the only option for addicts” - to the point of actually talking openly about using government coercive power to force people into treatment involuntarily.  

Their argument is largely based on a number of misguided notions about addiction, and how best to address it.  They largely view addiction as a personal moral failing - literally the addict is at fault for “putting the stuff in their body” in the first place, and should be grateful that we provide places for them to “get clean”.  

That is, to be charitable, a horribly naive way of looking at the issue.  I’m not going to spend a ton of time here reviewing the academic literature on addiction - if you want to get a taste of it, wander over to Google Scholar, and type in addiction and I think you’ll get a sense of the scope of the issues. 

However, since the 1980s, the illicit drugs world has changed a lot. Back then the most dangerous substances were things like heroin, or possibly freebasing cocaine.  Overdoses certainly happened, but compared to now they were rare. Today’s drug supply on the street is many orders of magnitude more dangerous, and compounds are being mixed together in ways that most of us can’t even begin to imagine. 

I do agree that addiction is a major problem for policy makers to address.  Where I disagree with policy makers across the board is in the simplistic, one (or maybe two) dimensional approaches to government policy being implemented.  We cannot treat this as a singular monolith issue any longer. 

We need to implement a package of policies to deal with the issues - and it will take significant resources on multiple fronts to do it right. 

A Proposal

About That "Car Theft Problem"

So, in the last few days, much virtual ink has been spilled by the press and conservative politicians about Canada's "car theft problem".  I'm not going to spend a ton of time analyzing it, but I do want to point out a few things on the matter. 

Conservatives always jump to "tougher penalties", and sadly, our justice minister seems to be following suit (presumably to shut Poilievre up by taking a card out of his hand).  Tougher penalties is easy politics, but frankly has nothing to do with any kind of deterrent effect.  At most, you're basically going to round up a handful of street level operatives who are stealing cars - but they aren't the real problem. 

The real problem here is organized crime.  This isn't a "steal a car for a joyride" thing, this is a big business, with a sophisticated supply chain for acquiring cars, shipping them overseas, and reselling them as luxury goods.  Same thing with illicit drugs on our streets - the problem isn't the drugs on the streets, it's the criminal organizations who make, distribute, and ultimately sell this shit. 

You want to bring this to its knees?  Go after the high level criminals.  Those old enough to remember the cops going after "Mafia" in the 1970s and later will recall that those investigations took a long time to bear fruit.  It involved getting people into the organization, or recruiting informants, and then spending years gathering the evidence needed to take down the people in control.

That's what we need to do again.  Only this time it isn't the "Italian Crime Family" that needs to be dismantled, it's a criminal enterprise that is far more sophisticated.  International cooperation will be essential to chasing these people down, because I guarantee you that most of what is in Canada are low to mid-level players.  The captains of these underground businesses are elsewhere.