Pubdate: Thu, 12 Jan 2017 Source: Vancouver Sun (CN BC) Copyright: 2017 Postmedia Network Inc. Contact: http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/477 Author: Pete McMartin Page: A5 FORMER B.C. PREMIER RELUCTANTLY OPTS FOR LEGALIZATION OF DRUGS Long, long ago, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and the B.C. political landscape, Mike Harcourt was a fresh-faced criminal defence lawyer. His anti-freeway crusade, his Vancouver mayoralty and his premiership were all still before him. He had yet to fall from his cottage deck. He saw some pitiful things as a lawyer in the courtroom days - mostly, they were his clients. "Some of them, like George, a really lousy crook, suffered from what we called 'wilful blindness'. Didn't remember robbing a bank, with his fingers in his pocket pretending it was a gun, when six video cameras and seven witnesses, including the teller, did remember. Ran to his getaway car but he'd locked himself out. Police arrived to see him trying to bust into his old jalopy," Harcourt recalled. Harcourt sees too much of it being played out on the streets with fentanyl. Unlike most of us, Harcourt has had a unique and ongoing vantage point of the long progression of drug abuse the public never had - from law, from the Mayor's chair and chair of the police board, from the very highest political office in the province. During that progression, Harcourt's views on drugs have evolved to a place to where many have yet to go. He thinks they should be legalized. "My thinking was that in the 1960s, '70s and '80s the drug policies we had certainly weren't working, but that's when you had the full-throated war on drugs happening, and I was watching these pretty sad-soul clients of mine troop before the courts and go off to jail with very few treatment programs around. They (the police) would get the low-lying fruit, the street dealers, but not usually nabbing the big guys at the top of the pyramid of the drug trade. So I saw what we were doing was not going anywhere, but there was no appetite (to consider legalization) and certainly it was political suicide to talk about legalizing all drugs." Harcourt himself has been touched by the drug epidemic: His home was broken into three times despite an alarm system - on one occasion with the police finding heroin residue on the blanket the thief had used to muffle the breaking of an upstairs bedroom window. "I think (the public conversation) has changed because it's sunk in that it's not working and that there's a lot of waste. I think a lot of people are seeing now what a disaster it's been. That's obvious, but what do you do about it?" Harcourt chose legalization. He did so reluctantly. "When we talk (about legalization), realize I'm not enthusiastically advocating legalizing drugs. I hate anybody being addicted/ enslaved to booze, cigarettes, legal or illegal pharmaceuticals. However, in public policy, choices a lot of the time aren't between good, better and best. They're usually between bad, worse and sh-tiest. So choosing between the failed war on drugs of the last 80 years, or doing nothing and watching thousands die from fentanyl, or worse, laced heroin, cocaine or other drugs, then trying to regulate drug usage - like Portugal is doing, or Canada and Ecuador is doing with marijuana, leading towards moderate usage or abstinence - seems the best of a bad lot of choices. For example, Switzerland has a program for long-term heroin addicts of heroin maintenance leading to abstinence. The program has a 71 per cent success rate. The personal, family and societal damage done by intemperate drug usage is huge. So it's irresponsible to not try to deal with thi! s area of human misbehaviour." Morally, Harcourt finds himself conflicted by legalization. In the case of a deadly drug like fentanyl, he wonders how anyone could be so reckless as to risk their lives so easily. It offends the sane person's sense of responsibility. It gives rise to a sense of just desserts, or as Harcourt characterized that thinking, "Well, you had a choice, and if you chose to kill yourself, tough luck." "I have a sort of ambivalence about it," Harcourt said. "It's a moral dilemma because people are making these choices. But ..." But people will die. But we will be implicitly condoning their deaths. But we don't think that way for those afflicted with alcoholism, and we do all in our power as a society to convince smokers to stop smoking, and we have begun to campaign against the ruinous and addictive qualities of sugar - drugs that are legal and that take as great, if not greater, a toll on the public's health than drug addiction. But when has logic ever entered our thinking about drugs? - --- MAP posted-by: