Source: Victoria Times Colonist (Canada) Contact: Pubdate: Tue, 24 Nov 1998 Author: Gil Puder http://members.home.net/gilpuder CASH WON'T HELP WAR ON DRUGS David Staples' Nov 19 article (Funding cuts hamstring war against drugs) is symptomatic of the bureaucratic myopia that controls criminal drug enforcement. Bigger budgets and property seizure will hurt, not improve public safety. Shutting down CLUE has been openly talked about for the 17 years I've been in policing. The stories I hear from my colleagues who've worked there are about Mountie-Muni turf fights rather than catching organized crime kingpins. Budgetary largesse in past years enabling some municipal police to accompany RCMP officers on overseas junkets hardly justifies throwing more money at a failure. Suggesting otherwise truly exemplifies the folly of the drug war. One must also ask how much money would ever be enough to satiate the drug enforcement appetite. Nobel laureate economist Milton Friedman has for years stated that market forces will always prevail over police intervention, with increased enforcement only driving up the violence and profiteering. British economist Richard Stevenson has identified drug cartels with more financial power than some nations. Could anyone but a Canadian public servant bureaucrat possibly be naive enough to believe that the taxpayer funder trough runs that deep? Understandably, broke police managers want to keep seized assets, but the practice has inevitably led to corruption and violence. When an innocent Californian millionaire gets killed by a drug squad trying to seize his house with a bogus search warrant, people better ask themselves if they really want to turn their cops into money-makers. Ex-Inspector Staple's good old days really weren't that good, because they simply created the mess we're in now. For too many years we've been playing morality poker with public safety for chips, and it's no time to raise the stakes when you hold a losing hand. Gil Puder Vancouver - --- Checked-by: Richard Lake