Category: Regulation

That’s the intention of Canada’s federal government.
Namely, to include methylenedioxypyrovalerone (MDPV), a synthetic substance that causes stimulant-like psychoactive effects, in Schedule I of the Controlled Drugs and Substances Act. At least that’s the proposal formally announced in the Canada Gazette on June 9, 2012. This follows Health Minister Leona Aglukkaq’s announcement that the drug would be banned because of “recent media reports [that] have linked the use of ‘bath salts’ to violence causing harm.” Interested parties have until July 8, 2012 to comment (details below).

As the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse so carefully noted, “bath salts are not salts that go in your bath.”

Rather, it’s the common name given to MDPV, one of the possible ingredients in a substance available for sale, but as of yet, not regulated in Canada, unlike many of its amphetamine-like cousins already prohibited in Schedule III.

The government’s claim that bath salts are linked to violence stems from highly sensationalistic reporting of a tragic assault case in Miami where a man was shot and killed by police while apparently eating the face of another man. Miami police officials speculated that this attack was caused by the use of bath salts, though toxicology tests won’t be ready for a few weeks. Nor do they care that the man at the centre of this story had a history of violence, according to Kate Heartfield in the Ottawa Citizen.

The move to ban MDPV comes amid a news cycle in which numerous stories purport to detail the effects of its use, including a segment of CBC’s The Current with Anna Maria Tremonti on May 30^th. The Current marshaled interviews from Halifax with a former bath salts user and an addictions treatment doctor to underscore the supposedly uniquely dangerous effects of this drug and give it a homegrown spin. Sound familiar? It should. Similar “drug scare” narratives have been constructed around the popularization of numerous substances, including crystal meth, PCP, crack, speed, LSD, heroin, reefer and of course, opium.

The rush to ban MDPV and place it in Schedule I will mean that the harshest drug law penalties can be applied to people who use, traffic or produce this drug. As researchers have noted, the banning of drugs like Mephedrone often drives its use and manufacture further underground, inflates the price and prevents the implementation of potentially helpful forms of regulation. Prohibiting substances has not made people safer, and has not resulted in the elimination of drug use. It can also displace drug use back to traditional illegal drugs, or to newer, potentially more dangerous “legal highs.”

We don’t want to ignore the voices of people who have negative experiences with MDPV but neither do we want to rush to ban this drug. In this case, it’s a political response that can placate worried voters but it also alleviates politicians of the responsibility to meaningfully address the underlying causes of problematic substance use.  We urge you to express your concerns about this ban.

Comments on this proposed change can be directed to Mr. Nathan Isotalo, Regulatory Policy Division, Office of Controlled Substances, Address Locator: 3503D, 123 Slater Street, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 0K9, by fax at 613-946-4224 or by email at OCS_regulatorypolicy-BSC_ politiquereglementaire@hc-sc.gc.ca.

For more information see: Curiosity killed M-Cat: A post-legislative study on mephedrone use in Ireland, Marie Claire Van Hout1 & Rebekah Brennan. Drugs: education, prevention and policy, April 2012; 19(2): 156–162.

On April 9, the Canadian Drug Policy Coalition along with End Prohibition, PIVOT Legal Society, the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users (VANDU) and Western Aboriginal Harm Reduction Society will host free public event featuring author and professor, Ernest Drucker.

The event will begin at 7pm at Pivot Legal Society’s offices, 121 Heatley Street in Vancouver.

Author of Plague of Prisons: The Epidemiology of Mass Incarceration in America, Earnest will be speaking about the war on drugs in the USA and the potential consequences of the Canadian Conservative government’s new crime legislation.

To get you warmed up, below is a segment of a book review written by Craig Jones, PhD, Former Executive Director, John Howard Society of Canada previous to the passing of the Omnibus Crime Bill C10.

Every student of epidemiology learns the story of the Broad Street pump (London, Summer 1854), which marks the birth of epidemiology. In A Plague of Prisons, Ernest Drucker uses that story as a metaphor to explain the explosion of incarceration in the United States that followed the 1973 enactment of the Rockefeller drug laws and to illustrate how political decisions act as vectors – pumps – and how these vectors can create a social epidemic of gargantuan proportions, such as the United States coming to incarcerate 1 out of every 4 incarcerated persons in the world.

Drucker’s book can be read in three ways: as an undergraduate introduction to the explanatory power of social epidemiology; as a non-technical analysis of how the United States achieved its historically unprecedented rate of incarceration; and as a warning to Canadians on the propensity of criminalization of non-violent drug users to become a contagion with multi-generational consequences. The book’s timing is apt: Canadians are enacting the political mistakes that produced the plague of prisons in the United States. What were those mistakes?

There were three elements embedded in the Rockefeller drug laws that transformed a public health issue into mass incarceration and transmitted that contagion to the entire country. These include the decision to criminalize drug use; the political reliance on punishment as the appropriate response; and, the attack on judicial discretion through mandatory minimum sentences.

Of the three, the criminalization of drug use featuring large-scale arrests of low-level drug users primed the pump that fueled the contagion of self-sustaining criminality.

There are important differences in the way criminal justice is done between the United States and Canada – some of those differences will insulate Canada from the worst effects of the plague of prisons. But there are a couple of lessons for Canadians too.

The first is that criminal justice policy is too often made in a consequentialist vacuum – that is, without deliberation over downstream effects on families and particularly children of the incarcerated who will likely be the next generation of the incarcerated.

The political imperatives that pushed US policy makers into adopting mandatory minimum sentences appealed to the short-term interests of private prison contractors, correctional officer unions, victims’ advocates, judges and prosecutors. Policies enacted for short-term political opportunity have long-term economic and social consequences, a long tail, but these are of little moment compared to the immediate electoral advantage.

The children of the incarcerated – who are at higher risk of incarceration themselves – have no one to speak for them, at least no one with the clout of correctional officer unions or private prison contractors.

The second lesson is that it is hard to reverse bad policy ideas once they take hold in the public imagination – even once the fiscal costs become unsustainable and the policy itself is clearly failing. As is now clear, the proliferation of mandatory sentencing regimes across the United States has pushed several jurisdictions – Texas, California, Ohio, Florida and New York – to the brink of insolvency, yet they have not achieved rates of crime reduction greater than those jurisdictions that did not embrace draconian sentencing practices.

Worse, the sentencing regimes are hard to unwind because they have created a political constituency where prisons have become a source of high-income, non-polluting jobs.

The third lesson Canadians should heed is that – in seeking to increase the burden of punishment – criminal justice systems engender a self-perpetuating underclass of non-violent but ever more marginalized persons who, because of onerous pardon requirements, may never be reintegrated. They simply cycle through the prison system and transmit the contagion of criminality to their children and family members.

This is a cautionary tale. Canadians would be wise to be more attentive to Drucker’s warnings on the self-sustaining dynamic that emerges out of deliberately growing the rate of incarceration for electoral advantage.

The Global Commission on Drug Policy is comprised of significant world leaders that are calling for change in the way we approach problem drug use and the war on drugs. Today the Global Commission appealed, in an open letter to the Canadian Senate to reject the introduction of mandatory minimum sentences for minor marijuana offenses as proposed in Bill C-10, which is being debated by the Canadian Senate. In addition, the Commission recommends Canadians evaluate possibilities around taxing and regulating cannabis as an alternative strategy to undermine organized crime and improve community health and safety.

“The Global Commission supports Stop the Violence BC’s suggested approach of regulating marijuana under a public health framework,” said Ilona Szabo, spokesperson for the Secretariat of the Global Commission on Drug Policy.

“Mandatory minimum sentences and further reinforcement of prohibition are not rational or prudent solutions.”

Kudos to Stop the Violence BC (STVBC), a coalition of health professionals who have been consistently pointing out the absurdity of criminalizing the production, sale and possession of cannabis in British Columbia.The evidence clearly shows that cannabis prohibition actually increases harms to individuals and communities across Canada. STVBC is calling for a rational process of change that would see cannabis become a regulated and controlled substance and taken out of the unregulated illegal drug market. The Canadian Drug Policy Coalition is a member of the STVBC Coalition and is also calling for the end to the criminalization of people who use drugs.

Throwing people in jail does nothing to help communities address problematic substance use or help individuals access health services should they need them.

The winds of change are blowing and public opinion supports this change. Keep in touch with us and check out STVBC.organd see what you can do to work towards a drug policy for Canada that is based on principles of public health and human rights and scientific evidence.

Today the Senate Committee looking into Bill C-10 heard from two very different panels.The first represented Corrections Service Canada (CSC) and the Parole Board of Canada. The second had representatives from the John Howard Society of Canada and the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies.

Both of these latter organizations work towards reforming the justice system and helping offenders—many of whom are themselves victims. Given such mandates, it was no surprise when Kim Pate, Executive Director of Elizabeth Fry, and Catherine Latimer, Executive Eirector of John Howard, both came out against the bill.

This opposition met with incomprehension from Senator Lang, who demanded to know how the Canadian Association of Elizabeth Fry Societies could not support this bill given that it included mandatory minimum sentences (MMS) for a variety of sexual crimes. He went so far as to accuse Ms. Pate of not sharing all of the information on the bill with her member societies.

Ms. Pate had a very interesting and nuanced response: according to her, when it comes to sex offences, MMS can actually dissuade a victim from coming forward. Victims of these crimes are already under immense pressure; often their abusers are in positions of authority, or are the breadwinners in their household. Lengthier prison terms means that an accused who may have pled guilty will instead choose to go to trial, putting more pressure on the victim to recant. Ms. Pate brought up cases of women of colour in the United States advising one another not to report domestic abuse because of the disastrous effects MMS can have on their communities.

Furthermore, testimony from Jan Looman, Psychologist and Program Director of the high intensity sex offender treatment program at CSC, showed that recidivism among sex offenders is very low. According to his data, “90-95% of sex offences are first time offences, and the vast majority don’t reoffend.”

Effectively C-10 will mean that more victims will be less likely to come forward, and sex offenders who are already at a very low risk of reoffending will be locked up for longer.

But, you may ask, shouldn’t they be locked up? That’s where they will receive their treatment, right? Not necessarily.

Pointed questions from Senators Runciman, Fraser and Cowan to the CSC made it clear that treatment for sex offenders and others requiring psychiatric intervention was imperiled by lack of funding and the CSC’s difficulty in retaining professionals within their ranks.

Senator Runciman argued that in cases where correctional officers were replaced with healthcare professionals, such as in St. Lawrence Valley Correctional and Treatment Centre in Brockville, Ontario there are excellent results in terms of decreased recidivism and improved prison life in general. However, as Senator Fraser pointed out, in Howard Sapers’ preliminary evaluation of CSC’s new “Integrated Correctional Programming Model,” many programs for specific groups, including Aboriginal offenders, had been removed, resulting in the programs offered being decreased by up to a factor of 3. This “one size fits all” approach at CSC is commensurate with Bill C10’s approach to justice. However, with so many mentally ill people in prison, it is clear that cookie cutter approaches, to both sentencing and programming, will not work.

As witness after witness points to the high effectiveness of prevention measures, community justice initiatives, andalternative sentencing, one has to wonder why anyone would think that solving Canada’s crime problems should involve putting more people in prison.

Though, perhaps we actually have an answer looking for a question; C-10’s myopic approach to criminal justice is sure to create more recidivists through lack of programming and over-incarceration. So Stephen Harper will soon get a chance to be tough on crime—the crime that his own legislation will have created.

According to some Conservative senators and many victims’ groups appearing at the committee hearings into Bill C-10, Canadians have lost confidence in the judiciary. Mandatory minimum sentences (MMS) are supposed to restore this confidence by forcing judges to hand down stiffer sentences. To this end, Senator Lang stated today that Parliament must provide a “moral compass” not only to offenders, but to the judiciary, regarding sex offences “so that they know that this is a very serious offense.”

There are two glaring problems with claiming C-10 somehow represents the popular will. The first is that it’s false.

Citing the Department of Justice’s own report, Graham Stewart, former executive director of the John Howard Society, told the senators that for Canadians, the number one principle of sentencing should be rehabilitation. Furthermore, the same report states that over 75% of Canadians are confident in our criminal justice system.

This brings us to the second problem; justifying legislation with Bill C-10’s purported popularity. To illustrate this problem, Graham Stewart reminded us of the disastrous effects of another popular policy: Aboriginal residential schools.

Mr. Stewart characterized residential schools as the worst crime in Canadian history. Senator Frum countered, acknowledging that residential schools were indeed horrific, but that “the government didn’t rape anyone,” and that it will not be the government raping anyone with Bill C-10 either; rather, the government will simply be ensuring that convicted offenders receive jail time.

The problem with Senator Frum’s view of the matter is that both residential schools and Bill C-10 set up an institutional capacity for the abuse of authority. C-10 will force judges to dole out arbitrary sentences, as well as giving the Correctional Service of Canada more latitude to administer unjust punishments to those in custody.

With such horrific, long-lasting results, why were residential schools so popular for the Canadian public at the time? They promised to educate the residents and improve their lives. They couldn’t know the intergenerational trauma that would result.

But in the case of MMS, we do have experience to draw on that should prevent us from committing such a mistake again. As Mr. Stewart submitted to the committee, in 1974 prior to implementing MMS, the US had a prison population of 149 per 100,000 people. In Canada it was 89 per 100,000. The difference was significant then; however, 40 years later that difference is staggering. After implementing MMS, the US prison population jumped over 400% to 730 per 100,000. In Canada 118 people per 100,000 are currently incarcerated, an increase of 33% since 1974 according to Mr. Stewart’s figures.

The result of MMS in the US is a human rights nightmare, with entire generations of people being consigned to the equivalent of a human garbage bin. In the US, MMS has targeted the most vulnerable in society, with 1 in 9 black men between 20 and 34 incarcerated. Over half of these inmates are in prison on drug charges. Our system is already going in that direction, with a disproportionate amount of Aboriginal people, women, people with mental illness, older people, and people with addictions in prison.

The point here, made by both Jackson and Stewart, is that the state’s powers to detain people in the service of public safety must be balanced by respect for human rights.

And while some may not have any concern for the rights of prisoners, respecting their human rights while incarcerated is essential to public safety. There is a chain of causality from increased prison crowding—already an epidemic in Canada, with some provinces at over 200% capacity, that will only be exacerbated by C-10—through to recidivism.

Furthermore, increasing incarceration rates, regardless of the kind of offence, increases the use of injection drugs and thus the rate of blood-borne disease among prisoners, nearly all of whom will one day be released into the population.

Beyond MMS, the legislation imperils democracy by undermining human rights in prison. The bill replaces the requirement that corrections officers use “least restrictive measures” to control inmates with “appropriate measures.” According to Professor Jackson, the requirement to use the least restrictive measures in controlling inmates is enshrined in constitutional law through the Oakes case, and was meant to amend the horrific conditions faced by prisoners in Canada in the 1970s, which itself resulted in a wave of prison riots and hostage taking. One can only wonder what decreasing standards for punishments in prison, coupled with an increase in overcrowding, will mean for the prison population.

We have heard so much evidence put forward by legal experts that nearly every part of Bill C-10 will be the target of a constitutional challenge.

In much the same way that this bill will create a crime problem in Canada where there was none, the unconstitutionality of these supposedly popular measures will likely result in the Conservative party spinning more rhetoric about judicial activism, thus fabricating the very lack of confidence in the judiciary they are using to justify the bill itself.

In painting MMS as a panacea to Canada’s crime problem and ignoring the impact of prohibition on the health of Canadian society, the Conservative government has blinkered us to real alternatives and made judges somehow the enemy of justice.