Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Null Value.

“We do not use statistics as an excuse not to get tough on criminals.” That was federal Justice Minister Rob Nicholson’s astonishing response to Statistics Canada’s finding in July that crime rates in Canada now stand at the same level they did in 1973. Don’t bother us with the facts, was Nicholson’s meaning, our minds are made up. We’re going to get tough on crime—despite the fact that the criminals have gone soft on us.

Stephen Harper’s new majority government vowed last spring to pass an omnibus crime bill during the first 100 sitting days of the new parliament, a deadline that is fast approaching. The bulk of the bill is dedicated to introducing new mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offences. For instance, the last incarnation of the bill (it was never voted on before the last election and could change) specified a minimum one-year sentence for any drug crime on behalf of a gang or involving a weapon. The minimum raised to two years if the crime was committed near a school. Producing a drug nets a mandatory three years if the production posed a threat to minors or public health.

You don’t have to condone criminality to see that mandatory minimums, especially for drug-related crime, are the kind of cynical laws that play well on voter doorsteps and fail miserably in almost every other context. They don’t make the general public any safer; they harden minor criminals in the crucible of prison; and they cost a fortune.

Judges don’t like them, since they tie their hands and leave no room for context or, well, judgment (Justice John Gomery calls such legislation “a slap in the face” to judges). Prosecutors seldom like them, since they provide defendants no incentive to plead guilty in exchange for a lesser punishment. Corrections officials’ feelings are mixed at best; their budgets inevitably swell, but overcrowding causes greater problems.

Even the United States—the world capital of magical thinking on drug crime—is backpedalling on mandatory minimums for drug cases. A CBC report found a dozen states— Republican- and Democrat-run—that are repealing mandatory minimums. They cite a comprehensive array of complaints, from abstract doubts about the constitutionality of the practice, to practical, bottom-line problems with out-of-control policing and corrections costs.

The facts show that Canadians are safer than they have been in two generations, yet the Harper government is plunging ahead anyway. This policy will inflate the government’s corrections budget to $3.1 billion in 2012–2013 (including $466 million just to build new prisons). For that price tag you’d hope to bag the kingpins—but of course, that’s not what this is about. Instead we will victimize and incarcerate the most impoverished and desperate small time crooks and call it justice. If you believe that poverty reduction, alternative sentencing, addiction counselling, and evidence-based policymaking are better ideas, this government has one word for you: tough.

Bodies lie in a ditch in rural Mexico, as police look on. Photo by Tomas Bravo/Reuters

The first of Juan Escobedo’s many trials began in 2007 when his common-law wife, Lisbeth, then just 31, was diagnosed with cancer. The couple had four children and little money. At the time, Escobedo (not his real name) drove a bus he rented by the day around the city of Oaxaca and Lisbeth worked as a cleaner at the Mexican Social Security Institute. As a state employee, she qualified for free radiation and chemotherapy treatment at a public hospital, but doctors there held out little hope. It quickly became clear Lisbeth did not have long to live.

Escobedo’s second trial began in July 2008, when a gang of masked, gun-toting men burst into his house in the middle of the night. They blindfolded and tied him up along with Lisbeth and bundled them both into a van. They drove them to the Huayapam reservoir, where Escobedo was held underwater until he almost drowned, then beaten while Lisbeth was forced to look on. Their assailants identified themselves as members of “Los Zetas,” and said they wanted the couple to work for them. “They said, ‘We want a place from which to make sales and you are going to work for us, you understand?’” Escobedo recalls. “My wife was sick, and even so they made her sell drugs from our house.”

In a region known for corruption, electoral fraud and strong-arm politics, the Escobedos were just the kind of people the Zetas knew they could control and extort—average citizens without resources or connections. “They forced me to sell drugs, but others, they were forced to keep an eye on us,” he explains. “So anyone who said anything or made an accusation, for sure they would kill them.” The Zetas made copies of the couple’s identification cards, but that wasn’t the only factor that trapped them. What really stopped the couple from trying to escape, says Escobedo, was the fact that outside Oaxaca, Lisbeth’s cancer treatments would no longer be paid for by the state, and there was no way Juan could afford to pay for them himself.

He describes this period as “very painful. Like something you might see in a movie, but I was living it. I couldn’t do anything, and this put me into a kind of shock. I wanted to die.” By then, his wife was in constant pain and unable to sleep, “crying and moaning all the time,” he recalls. Every day for four months, dealers and addicts would climb onto his bus and purchase small bags of cocaine and crack, which he kept in his change box beside the steering wheel. Passengers and police alike took no notice. At one point, the couple was once again blindfolded and taken to a house where they joined a circle of people similarly bound. Two men brought in a third and beheaded him with a machete in front of the group’s horrified eyes—his punishment, they were told, for trying to escape. This was where Escobedo saw the one person he could identify, a uniformed police commander named Castillo.

In September 2008, Lisbeth died and Escobedo sent his children to stay with relatives. Mourning and hopeless, he also stopped working. Two weeks later, Castillo came to see him. “He said, ‘You’ll keep on working for us because you work for us.’ I really didn’t want to, so he said, ‘Here it’s not whether you want to or not,’ and he pulled out a knife. I didn’t know if he wanted to kill me or what his intentions were, but he stabbed me twice in the leg.”

In desperation, Escobedo’s father called Juan’s older sister, who lives in Canada, to see if she could help. She paid for his passport and a plane ticket, and in April 2009, with $5 to his name, Escobedo landed in Canada and immediately applied for refugee status. With his application to the Canadian Immigration and Refugee Board, Escobedo became one of the unprecedented 9,309 Mexican migrants seeking Canadian refugee status last year.

Though Escobedo’s status as a refugee applicant allowed him to go on welfare, he found work in Toronto instead. “I am not here to take anything from this country,” he says. “I am here for the second chance I wouldn’t have otherwise. And because I am more use to my family alive than dead.”

As drug-related violence sweeps across Mexico and the death toll rises, Canada has responded by shutting out more and more Mexican refugees fleeing the mayhem. In 2006, when 4,955 Mexicans applied, the Immigration and Refugee Board accepted 28 percent of those applications. That acceptance rate steadily dwindled to just eight percent, and in July 2009, the immigration ministry placed a visa requirement on all Mexicans travelling to Canada, essentially halting the flow entirely.

Lawyers and others who work with Mexican refugee claimants readily agree that there are opportunists using the violence as a pretext to enter Canada for short-term, higher-paid work than they can get at home. The dilemma they face is not gang-style execution, but a profound lack of economic opportunities.

“You have people in Mexico selling stories,” says Francisco Rico-Martinez, who heads the Faithful Companions of Jesus Refugee Centre and has been helping refugees for more than 20 years. “You come and the only detail is to say that you will be killed in Mexico if you go back. So we have those cases as well—people who are desperate for the lack of future and the poverty in Mexico, and they use any way to get out.”

Rico-Martinez estimates that roughly 60 percent of Mexicans claiming asylum here fit that profile, while 40 percent are at genuine risk of violence or murder. Yet Citizenship, Immigration and Multiculturalism Minister Jason Kenney routinely refers to all Mexican asylum claims as “bogus,” fostering a climate of skepticism even toward legitimate claimants who can document the persecution and death threats they have experienced. In these cases, says lawyer Mordechai Wasserman, the IRB “skips any consideration of credibility whatsoever. They jump to state protection. They say that Mexico is a democracy, that there’s a presumption of state protection.”

For the IRB, Mexico is a sunny travel destination, a functioning democracy where citizens have ample recourse within its domestic laws to deal with serious crime. When Wasserman points to the murders of police, soldiers, and members of the judiciary as evidence of the lack of state protection, the IRB says that evidence simply indicates that the police were killed in the line of duty and the government is making an effort to root out corruption. The absurdity of that rosy view drives Wasserman crazy. “I just want to tear my hair out,” he says.

Wasserman isn’t alone in his frustration. Aviva Basman, a lawyer at Toronto’s Refugee Law Office, describes her Mexican clients as “some of my most traumatized and most compelling cases.” Many are battered women, whose husbands have backchannel connections to Mexico’s public security apparatus that allow them to repeatedly track down and attack them. “I feel like I’m banging my head against a wall,” she says, “because you go in and make what you think are very strong legal arguments based on facts as they now are in Mexico, that is so dire, and then you get a kind of boilerplate answer back.”

Among the most prominent cases of those refused is that of Wasserman’s client Gustavo Gutierrez. A detective commander with the Ciudad Juárez police force investigating the murders of more than 200 young women, Gutierrez fled to Canada after 36 of his colleagues were killed and he himself began receiving death threats from traffickers.

Another is Toluca lawyer Alfonso Vega, who was represented by Andrew Brouwer of the Refugee Lawyers Association of Ontario. Thanks to two legal cases Vega was pursuing against their members, he ran afoul of the shadowy yet powerful Atlacomulco Group. Wasserman had a client who was actually told by an employee of the Public Prosecutor’s Office that he would be killed if he did not leave the country. His claim was also denied by the IRB.

However, one of the most gruesome consequences of an IRB decision affected a Mexican woman identified only as Nuemi.

She came to Canada with two daughters in 2004, after she and her family received death threats from the Familia Michoacana cartel. The family’s claim was rejected, but the women stayed in Canada fighting deportation orders until, in August 2008, the elder daughter returned home to visit her dying grandmother.

Detected by La Familia and raped, Nuemi’s daughter flew back to Canada—which promptly deported her back to Mexico in December. Nuemi and her younger daughter were deported the following February, and all three women went into hiding at the home of an elderly friend. Only weeks later, then seven months’ pregnant as a result of the rape, Nuemi’s elder daughter was kidnapped. Police found her body in June; not only had she been beaten and shot in the back of the head, but the baby she had been carrying had been removed by Caesarean section. The elderly man sheltering them was also killed. His family, not surprisingly, told them to leave.

After receiving various desperate email messages from Nuemi, Rico-Martinez and Basman succeeded in bringing her and her surviving daughter back to Canada on temporary residence permits. Adding insult to injury, the condition of Nuemi’s return was that she reimburse Citizenship and Immigration Canada for their original deportation costs— including those of her murdered daughter.

While Nuemi’s assertion that she and her family lived in fear of their lives—and that Mexican authorities were incapable of protecting them—was tragically and graphically proven by her daughter’s grisly death, the IRB continues to rely on the “Internal Flight Alternative.” It suggests that applicants move elsewhere within their own country, such as Mexico City, where, in the words of one ruling, “I am convinced that state protection would be reasonably forthcoming.”

For lawyers defending what they feel are clearly meritorious refugee claims, their clients risk becoming victims of the Mexican government’s stated intention—but demonstrated inability—to protect its own citizens.

“There’s this belief,” says Basman, “that it’s okay as long as the government is trying to protect—even if it can’t.”

It is early summer and Mexico City bathes in the sweltering heat of a dry season stubbornly refusing to give way to the rains. Even as the number of deaths from the government’s struggle against organized crime reaches past 23,000, even as one of the nation’s most powerful men (former presidential candidate Diego Fernández de Cevallos) is himself kidnapped, life goes on in the vast metropolis and in towns and cities across the country. In Oaxaca, an international aid and human rights caravan is attacked and two activists killed, but no police investigation will take place and everyone accepts this. It is as if an alternate reality, a webbing of uncontrollable criminality, lurks below the surface of daily life. It’s a reality to which Mexicans, appalled as they may be, are becoming accustomed.

“It’s not like you’re fearful just walking down the street,” says John Mill Ackerman, professor at the Institute of Legal Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, “but if you’re targeted by a drug cartel, there’s really nothing you can do. And this,” he adds, “is an inheritance of the authoritarian system of government. This has been the big problem of the democratic transition of the last 10 years. We are still working with the same state apparatus, the same institutions. The changing colours of the party has led to different groups or mafias coming in or out of government— but not to a real conquest of formal institutions over informal institutions.”

Mexicans who, like Juan Escobedo, have for one reason or another fallen afoul of what Ackerman calls “powerful informal actors” should be seeking protection from the federal attorney general, or PGR. Its Ministerio Publico, or Public Prosecutors Office, has the job of not only investigating crimes, but deciding which cases will be prosecuted. “The Ministerio Publico is in total control of every part of criminal proceedings,” says Ackerman.

While the 2000 ousting of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party from government may have cracked open the political system, the judiciary remains mired in a culture of favouritism, secrecy, and corruption.

Judges rarely question or even see defendants during trial. There are no juries, no oral arguments, and no public access to evidence until the trial is over. Evidence gathered under torture is admissible, and most suspects are found guilty without scientific proof like fingerprints or DNA. In this system, prosecutors have unusually broad powers, deciding if a suspect is guilty before their day in court and using their own police force to gather evidence to support those decisions.

For José Rosario of the non-governmental Miguel Agustin Pro Juárez Human Rights Centre, the probability of such a system offering protection is “almost zero. There are many inequalities in Mexican society,” he says, “and those same inequalities reproduce themselves in the justice system.” What’s more, Mexican law severely limits the effectiveness, and so the likelihood, of people from one state accusing anyone of so-called “common” crimes like extortion, threats, kidnapping, or even murder in another. To seek justice, victims must stay within the jurisdiction where the crime has occurred, putting themselves in even greater danger. And, says Ackerman, “that’s not going to happen because the person knows the Ministerio Publico itself is, if not totally corrupt, that at least a criminal gang will have eyes and ears there. They’re going to see who is actually charging them. So there’s a very strong disincentive to even accuse these people.” The entire apparatus allows organized crime to flourish. “Most Mexicans,” says Edgardo Buscaglia, a law professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico and an expert on organized crime, “consider the judicial system corrupt at all levels. By being conceived as corrupt by society, people do not report crimes, do not collaborate with the authorities and therefore any effort of the state is hampered.”

Originally trained by the Mexican army in the 1990s as an elite crime-fighting squad, a Mexican version of the Green Berets, the Zetas were soon co-opted by Osiel Cárdenas, leader of the Gulf Cartel. When Cárdenas was captured, “they slowly became more and more independent in many of their operations,” says Buscaglia, “at first with kidnappings, later extortions. And at some point they acquired so much economic power that they were able to divorce themselves from the Gulf Cartel.”

By now, he says, they are much more than a drug-trafficking gang. “They are a transnational organized crime group involved in 17 types of crimes, and present in 23 countries around the world.” Branching out into weapons and human trafficking, along with contract killings, protection rackets, and the kind of small yet profitable business of forcing non-members to retail drugs, “they have made fortunes out of this huge diversification,” he says.

Their financial clout and violent methods have allowed the Zetas to infiltrate police and judicial systems in several states, including Chiapas and Oaxaca. Infiltrating the federal government has been more of a challenge for them, says Buscaglia, but that’s only because their main rival, the Sinaloa Cartel, “has had a long-term monopoly on the capture of federal authorities at the highest level.”

There are 982 “pockets” in Mexico, where “the authorities and organized crime are one force,” Buscaglia adds, “and that’s the essence of a failed state. Mexico is facing limited symptoms of a failed state—and it’s expanding.”

Although President Felipe Calderón has continually proclaimed his desire to vanquish organized crime, dispatching the army throughout the country to do so, he seems unwilling to overhaul its dysfunctional justice system. “That system,” says Buscaglia, “is quite cosy for the political and business elite.”

Mexico’s congress did pass new acts designed to reform the justice system in 2008. With reform, says Buscaglia, “the capacity of organized crime to capture the judiciary would be limited.” But the president has done nothing to actually implement those changes. For Buscaglia, judicial reform is “a joke—two years have gone by and nothing substantive has been done.”

“The big opportunity of democratic transition,” says Ackerman, “the possibility of reforming our institutions, of bringing democracy into the state itself? Calderón just hasn’t done it.”

The third trial of Juan Escobedo is still under way. The ruling that will, in one way or another, change his life is yet to come. An April 2010 hearing was interrupted, as the IRB grappled with the fact that he took part in criminal activity, even if it was against his will. Another hearing in June was postponed. He remains convinced that if he does return to Mexico, the Zetas will somehow find him and subject him to the same gruesome death they have historically inflicted on so many others. “You don’t ask how they can find you,” he explains. “They have all your documents and that’s why they go and look for you.”

For her part, Basman is convinced that the IRB will carry on making negative rulings against Mexican claimants. “Because of the sheer number of claimants, there’s a fear,” she said, “that if you give positive decisions, you’re just encouraging more to come. If you recognize Mexico as a refugee-producing country, then more are going to come and they’re just going to be overwhelmed at the board.”

Yet in Mexico, said Buscaglia, “this nightmare will never cease until the violence and the suffering of average Mexicans reaches the political and business elite—when their families, their persons, and their net worth is actually hampered by organized crime, and the monster they created starts to eat them.”

Creative Commons photo by Flickr user Neeta Lind.

“This is about the complete failure of democracy,” Alan Young says, munching on his strawberry-jam toast at Sunnybrook Restaurant in Toronto. Young, a criminal lawyer, has been Canada’s forerunning pot reformist since he got a judge to declare that “marijuana is relatively harmless compared to the so-called hard drugs, and including tobacco and alcohol” during his landmark 1997 case, R. v. Clay. He’s behind many of the movement’s other big achievements too: convincing the courts prohibiting pot was unconstitutional for patients under medical supervision (R. v. Parker, 2000) and winning significant, progressive changes to Canada’s Marijuana Medical Access Regulations (Hitzig v. Canada, 2003). Now, at 53, he’s preparing for the next fight: taking on Health Canada and potentially criminal law, which could effectively nullify the Conservatives’ Bill C-15.

If passed into law—it died in the senate when Parliament recessed in December 2009 but is likely to be reintroduced—Bill C-15 would send Canadians caught with more than five marijuana plants to cells for a minimum of six months. Young believes this will effectively flood the judicial system with non-violent offenders, increase an already soaring deficit, and threaten authorized, medicinal grows—especially if they’re caught growing over their limit. “The Conservatives’ legacy will be disastrous,” he says of the bill. “They’re trying to use criminal law to solve every social problem.”

So Young will wage his battle on three fronts. First, he plans to strike down MMAR seed policies preventing patients from purchasing anything other than a single, domestic strain. Then, he’ll fight to increase the grower-patient ratio (it’s currently one-to-two). Lastly, and for Young most importantly, he plans to create an impediment for raids of authorized grows by requiring an initial Health Canada inspection. Young has no illusions that the bill will be stopped—“It’ll be upheld,” he says, resignedly—but hopes these counterweights will at least make it more difficult and expensive to get into people’s homes.

Young also hopes he can press the government to reconsider the path of least resistance: legalization. “Maybe they’ll say, ‘we can’t do this, so let’s just change our criminalization policies,’” he says. It’s not such wishful thinking. Young says Health Canada has already extended an olive branch by asking for a meeting, though he’s not entirely optimistic. “It’s probably just an attempt to neutralize me,” he quips.

But he’s not entirely pessimistic, either. That’s because his fighting principle is ultimately simple: people shouldn’t be sanctioned for their consumption patterns unless there is evidence they are harmful to society. “Right now,” he says, “chances of progressing the position on prohibition could actually be better than they have been.”

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.

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.