Consider the cost of property crimes and policing. The 1994 report of British Columbia's chief coroner, Vince Cain, quoted a police view that 60 per cent of non drug crime in the province is motivated by drug use. Think about that number. It comes in so many ways. John Lowman of Simon Fraser university is a national expert on prostitution.
Drug policy is the greatest social mistake of our time.
Aboriginals constituted 17 per cent of those testing HIV positive in 1996, though they make up only 4 per cent of the B.C. population. Then there's the issue of respect for our justice system, which goes far beyond one district of Vancouver. The system is overloaded, and drugs have a lot to do with it. Add to this bigtime money made in the drug trade and laundered into straight society, the common belief that hemp is B.C.'s largest agricultural export, the bad name given to some Asian countries and our refugee system generally by the infiltration of drug criminals from abroad, and the drug trade as the financial basis for motorcycle gangs. The answer is, we have imported an American approach to the drug question.