Proceedings of the Special Committee on
Illegal Drugs
Issue 15 - Evidence - March 18, 2002 (afternoon meeting)
OTTAWA, Monday, March 18, 2002
The Special Senate Committee on Illegal Drugs met today at 1:05 p.m. to re-examine the Canadian anti-drug legislation and policies.
Senator Pierre Claude Nolin (Chairman) in the Chair.
[Translation]
The Chairman: I call to order this meeting of the Special Senate Committee on Illegal drugs.
[English]
Colleagues, I wish to mention that an invitation, the last in a series, was sent to the U.S. Department of State. Since last October, we have invited, through myself or through Mr. Audcent, the ONDCP, the office of the drug czar in Washington. Before his appointment, the deputy of ONDCP was in charge during the change of government in Washington. We have invited the director of the Drug Enforcement Agency. We even extended an invitation to the U.S. ambassador in Ottawa. Late Friday afternoon, we received a note from the U.S. State department that they would not appear today.
It is important to hear from them directly. It is important for us to ask them questions, since we have heard many comments from witnesses and people interested in the work of our committee. I think it is still important to put those questions and comments to the proper United States officials.
Our last witness this afternoon is the executive secretary of the Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission, or to use the organization's Spanish acronym, the CICAD, Mr. David Beall.
Mr. Beall was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He received his Bachelor of Arts degree in English literature and economics from the University of Michigan in 1967. He also received a degree in public administration from George Washington University in 1978.
From 1968 to 1999, he worked for the U.S. Department of State — perhaps he can answer some of our questions — and was involved in numerous oversees assignments, including the direction of the country's narcotics program in Panama and Mexico. Among his Washington assignments, Mr. Beall was the executive director of the Department of State's worldwide inspector general operation, the country director for Brazilian affairs and the chief of staff for the Bureau of American Affairs.
Mr. Beall, welcome to our committee. Thank you very much for the interest you have shown in our work by accepting our invitation. If unforeseen questions or comments arise subsequent to your testimony, I will write to you.
Mr. David Beall, Executive Secretary, Inter-American Drug Abuse Control Commission: It is a pleasure to be here. I would like to begin by responding to some of the questions that you were kind enough to put in your letter of invitation. From there, I will pick up on some of the things that have characterized the concerns and discussion this morning.
I would like also to invite you to stop me at any time if you have a question.
CICAD is in the process of becoming an organization. As an institution, we only date from 1987. Very few institutions with such a brief history demonstrate maturity, and I would say that is true for us.
Having said that, the institution has changed itself very dramatically in a very short time. The state of mind governing people's reactions when CICAD was created is quite different today. We began with about eight members; now all of the countries of the Americas are members.
We essentially serve two purposes. One is what I would call the ``collective interest'' in the transfer of technology, knowledge and experience. It is all too easy to make that into a truism or something entirely trite, but in fact the value of experience is great, especially if you understand it. It is very easy to misrepresent it, but when it is genuine, it matters.
Technical assistance, therefore, is a primary role of the institution. It makes no difference whether technical assistance is carried out at the level of making law, making regulations, or applying counselling techniques. It is still technical assistance.
The second major role involves CICAD as a policy forum. The purpose is to allow people who have common problems but unique national responses to find a way to work together. That is frequently not easy. With drugs as the subject matter, it has been spectacularly difficult.
I would say that over the years, the learning curve has been a rather steep one, and countries have adjusted themselves in a significant fashion to a changing problem. This maturation has made possible policy discussions that we were probably not able to carry out at all initially.
I wish to refer immediately to the Anti-Drug Strategy of the Hemisphere and the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism. The strategy was a follow on from the first Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994. The evaluation mechanism became a child of the strategy, even though when that was negotiated it was in no one's mind at all. However, one surely led to the other.
True to the reality of this business, the strategy was supposed to have been delivered to the 1994 summit, but it was not because it could not be agreed upon. We took it up as damaged goods after the summit. We went back to the beginning and conducted a multilateral negotiation, which is why we achieved what we did.
It is a significant document. It is also a short document, and in most respects, fairly clear.
You asked about means and tools used by CICAD. I have already made a not-very-clear allusion to the means, which are the political wills of the countries. If it is possible to match them to any serious degree, things can be done. It is as simple as that.
The second means is the human aspect, the experience and knowledge that members bring. In other words, who is there? That has contributed a great deal. Sometimes, key contributions come from completely unexpected quarters, but that is one of the reasons why you sit down together in the first place.
Finally, our resources are contained in our budget. The budget is a pain in the neck because it is a very difficult subject in itself for the Organization of American States. It is difficult to allocate funds. Quotas are very difficult to alter because one change to a quota changes everyone else's. Funds are by no means easy to obtain. In fact, I noted in the paper that I sent that we have more money coming in from interested donors than from the institution itself.
That represents part of a broader reality that is more accepted today than it was some years ago. The idea that governments can do everything by themselves is simply no longer accepted by most governments, and certainly not by many institutions outside government. We end up working with many people who were not even in the equation when CICAD was set up as a voluntary organization of governmental executive departments.
I want to put the emphasis on the human side, what I called ``political will,'' because we are all so used to dealing with things in terms of money that, at least unconsciously, we think that it is possible to convert sums of money into given actions. If fact, life does not work that way. The political will to do something is much more valuable than a given sum of money.
The story telling about what is going on and what is the real state of affairs is constant. The trouble is that the real state of affairs is unknown, at least in any organized way. If you pay close attention to what you see and hear, almost all of it is anecdotal. Situations in the hemisphere are extremely complicated and do not have defined answers. They may not ever have answers within the operating time frame.
That does not lessen the responsibility to react, and part of that is the creation of the Multilateral Evaluation Mechanism. It is an assessment of the situation based on a number of negotiated indicators.
You begin the work by defining the questions of interest and gathering information on them on a standardized basis. The resultant must be evaluated and put down on paper, and we have those reports. The process leads not only to a statement about what the situation is, but what it should be.
Once you have agreed that on a given question, a certain state obtains, the second issue is whether that state should obtain, and if it not, what should be done. That leads to a recommendation, which leads to follow-up. Of course, all this takes place in public, and that too has a significant effect.
That documentation is available on the Web or in print. It is on a country-by-country basis, so you do not have to read all of it to understand a part. If you were just interested in one country, you could read about that. It also takes a hemispheric or regional approach.
The follow-up to the evaluation for 1999 and 2000 was released on January 30 this year. The recommendations issued in January 2001 were evaluated in terms of what action the states took on them and that was released in January 2002.
In the meantime, the second round of evaluation has already begun for the years 2001 and 2002. Next January, we will issue the evaluation for that period. By that time, all of this will be taken into account. It becomes a coherent and consistent means of looking at the same things, even though you change the frame of reference as you go along.
As a result of our experience in the first round, and as soon as it closed, the countries renegotiated all the indicators and increased them from 61 to 83, which surprised me. They became not only more numerous, but better, because they were all revised on the basis of what we learned in the first rounds.
I would say that we do not have a drug situation in the hemisphere. We have drug situations all over the place, none of which are the same. They all form part of the same cloth, but are different from state to state. We are making a good deal of progress in various areas on various questions. There are other areas where things are getting worse, and you must take the two together.
Concern about illicit substances is rising throughout the hemisphere and that will affect how they are considered. The question is broadening. In some cases, we have already gone past the point at which other outcomes were possible. It is no longer possible to talk about excluding drugs. They are there, and the only question is what can or should be done about them. The idea of ``protection'' in that sense is not realistic, so we must take an entirely different approach to the problem. The key element to that is what I call the ``acceptance of complexity.'' We are living at the beginning of a complex and dynamic situation. It will become much more complex and much more difficult to deal with.
We have become an organization that looks for cooperation first. If you look at the history, you will see that in 1987 it was a defensive organization designed to deal with the problem through cutting off the possibility of future growth at the roots. Depending on how we feel, we are either busy cutting off roots or cutting off heads. The problem is not susceptible to that sort of treatment, as I would hope we have learned by now.
In the future, you will see a very heavy focus within CICAD on the actions of national drug commissions within the Organization of American States, what makes them work and what keeps them from working. Also, we will see a very heavy focus on observatories. ``Observatory'' has something of a mystic appeal, but it should not. This is partly an observatory, and that is what it is all about.
There will also be a very strong focus on operations at the municipal level instead of the national or capital level of organizations. Programming will probably be much more focused on the communities than on the capitals. I can talk about that a little more if you wish.
CICAD began as an organization dealing with the confrontation that exists between a producer country and a consumer country. Those distinctions are worthless at this point. We all went forward, if we care to admit it, by coping. None of us had a grand design that proved to be perfect, or even close to perfect. Had that been so, it would have been adopted. At this stage, we need to focus on the nature of the problems. Exactly what are they, what do they do, and what are the individual, health and societal consequences?
If you have that information, you can make some serious decisions, although you may not solve the problem.
Within CICAD, it is easy to focus subconsciously on North America, South America or the Caribbean, and forget about Central America. However, it is a mistake. There are regional emphases, but the reality in each region is different. We must look for what links us, which is a great deal.
I would like to discuss a few things that will matter as we go forward and try to make the future. One is the law itself. It turns out that CICAD is completely dependent on the law. One cannot do anything without a legal base, whether it is on supply or demand. If the law is maladjusted to reality, then the rest of the system will pay the price. However, because we view the law collectively, there is a tendency to try to make its image in contemporary times the same as it has been in the past. That is, the law is forever; the law is majestic; the law exists because it is the only thing that could be. However, that is difficult to do. Once again, a law that refuses to adjust is only penalizing the rest of the system. Of course, that is also communicated to the administrative or executive side of affairs, and just as an overly rigid law prevents a proper reaction, an overly rigid bureaucracy does the same. A bureaucracy or executive arm that has all its actions prescribed seldom does the right thing. Other things can cause the same paralysis.
As to what we will be facing in the future, we have seen the very idea of what constitutes drug trafficking change, in a little over 100 years, from where there was no official interest at all, except in a mercantile sense, to where its political cast has overriding importance. That will change again, and very quickly.
When we look back on the 1960s and ask ourselves why that happened, it is not at all difficult to figure out. We had changes in technology, in communication, in what I call ``cultural carriers,'' and changes in substances themselves whose impacts are still rolling out today, but at the time were brand new. Things from the 1960s such as the nice, bright textiles and so forth were all new and looked like fun. For some people it was fun; for many it was not.
Whatever we think about that, we should be prepared to accept that it will happen much faster in the future. We will be looking at many more products, some that we will invent consciously and some that will just appear. We must learn how to deal with them and on an unexpected basis.
One gets the impression from some of the earlier testimony that where substances are concerned, the pleasurable effects, whether from an apple, a cigarette or whatever else, the principle is the same. However, we are just beginning to understand the exact effects on our biochemistry and neurology. While alcohol can have an effect on the liver over many years, certain kinds of drugs can have a similar effect on the brain overnight. What happens to the liver is in fact a change in the body's chemistry, and in the same way, what goes on in the brain is also frequently a chemical change. Our reaction times must become much faster than they have been.
Policy-wise, we will be looking at things in a far less simplistic way. The reason each question now gets so much attention has more to do with its associated value than its intrinsic value. Last week in Vienna, Sudan introduced a resolution that would make the language on marijuana stand out more sharply than it does now. It was interesting to hear how countries whose resource bases are already very narrow feel about the possibility of a shift. Countries such as Morocco and Libya, and organizations such as the Organization of African Unity, were talking about what this could mean for them. The question is not always about the thing itself, but all these associations. That is why we heard earlier today about arms trafficking. When these things first became of concern, it was not in the context of arms; today it is. These associations must all be looked at simultaneously.
We are looking at a future in which the presence of drugs can be assumed; the only question is how we will deal with them. In other words, we do not have the option of preventing them from permeating the system. That has happened and will continue to happen.
I now come back to the law. We must look at what the law needs to do in the future. This morning, you asked what we should do. We should be doing everything that we can. We were talking about the king who could actually do something, not just nudge it. If we had that choice, I would go for knowing what is going on, not only behaviourally but also scientifically. With that knowledge, the law can operate. Without it, the law, like any other part of the system, is working blind. That is the purpose of observatories and evaluation mechanisms.
No matter how good a job we do, we will need to accept that much will go on outside the law that will constantly require action by the law and its agents, and here I am speaking of both health and enforcement agents. However, what happens outside the law will be constantly washed back onto us. The faster we are able to deal with it, the better job we will do.
Finally, there is the overriding issue of what the public understands. At this point, the public is bombarded with all sorts of things that constitute mass but not organization. We do not yet deal very well with the information that we have. I suspect that if we do better in the future, it will be due to the observatories and the national commissions, because national laws are better able to articulate the problem and what it means to individuals and to communities.
Indirect controls or indirect influencing can sometimes be much more powerful than explicit measures, but the rationale behind those sorts of messages must be understood and communicated in a way that is relevant to the audience. I do not want to continue further; I would prefer to allow you to ask me questions.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Beall. I would also like to thank you for sending your brief to us. I will start with a technical question. You alluded to the budget of CICAD and I think you said that some 35 per cent of your budget comes from member countries?
Mr. Beall: It comes from the regular funds of the OAS, meaning that the Organization of American States has an overall budget of which we are a part.
The Chairman: OAS gives you 35 per cent of your budget. How is the remaining two-thirds funded?
Mr. Beall: It is completely voluntary donations by member states.
The Chairman: You mention permanent observer states in your brief. Who are they? Do they pay some kind of fee or make a contribution?
Mr. Beall: No. Membership in the Organization of American States is limited to countries in the hemisphere, but there is what we call ``participation'' via what are referred to as ``permanent observers.'' These are countries around the globe that are interested in what goes on in this hemisphere. Some of them also have interests in the business that we are working on — drugs. Where they are interested and responsive, they provide resources.
The Chairman: That includes other partner organizations?
Mr. Beall: Yes. Sometimes it is the UN; sometimes it is the European Commission.
The Chairman: Those partners are all multilateral organizations?
Mr. Beall: No.
The Chairman: Are they corporations?
Mr. Beall: For example, a partner observer like Spain makes direct contributions, but so does the European Commission. Once again, they are two different authorities. Madrid acts for reasons peculiar to Madrid while Brussels does the same for the European Commission.
The Chairman: Are private corporations supporting some of your budgets?
Mr. Beall: In a way, yes, but not very extensively. However, I am pretty sure that that will change.
The Chairman: Your organization does receive private funds?
Mr. Beall: Yes.
The Chairman: To what level?
Mr. Beall: Not a very high one yet, but let me give you an example. A year and a half ago, we implemented a training program on anti-money-laundering in the hemisphere. It was basically for bank supervisors so that banks would be able to control what is going on in their own system. The training materials that we developed became of interest to the Banco Vizcaya of Spain. It bought the copyright and used it for its entire system. We received that benefit, and they received a benefit as well. I expect we will see a lot more of that, especially as we go forward into community levels, because I think the corporate interest in communities is quite high.
The Chairman: Do you have any pharmaceuticals involved in your funding?
Mr. Beall: No, but I do not see why we should not. I think that would make good sense.
The Chairman: You talked about observatories. Do you assess and evaluate the quality of the national information that you receive?
Mr. Beall: First of all, all the information is official. Second, I would say that the largest number of recommendations that we had dealt with information. Throughout the hemisphere, there is a general lack of what I would call ``well-ordered'' information. You start there when putting the house in order. Get to know what is going on, where it is going on, and how it is going on if you wish to start taking remedial measures.
We did not do a preliminary survey to find the major problems. When the negotiations to design the indicators took place, the ones that emerged seemed to be the most relevant to those gathered, but that is where the analysis stopped. When the results came in, I think people were surprised to find that the most serious lack was systematically reliable information.
Senator Rossiter: How would you go about standardizing the information?
Mr. Beall: All the information that we seek is on a standardized basis for all the countries.
Senator Rossiter: You have set the qualifications?
Mr. Beall: They set them, exactly. Once you do that, you are asking for certain kinds of information transmitted in a certain way. A country may well come back and say, ``We do not do that.'' The country is then in the position of either saying, ``The information is irrelevant,'' or, ``It is useful but we do not know how to do it.'' We have fairly cost-efficient methodologies already worked out for some of these questions, although they are not up to academic standards. I am simply underlining the point that it is the basic information that matters. You do not need to be 100 per cent right. If you are 70 or 80 per cent right, you are doing really well. The identification of the problem frequently leads to a focus on the solution.
We have some standard instruments on both the supply and the demand side. I expect we will be negotiating more. The most frequent recommendation was the need to establish a system to estimate national economic and social costs of drugs. That, in turn, ended up going to the third summit here in Quebec City and came back as a recommendation. We will be trying to do that because I consider it to be absolutely fundamental. If you have that basic information, then you can begin to make effective policy.
The Chairman: Other than the U.S., which countries have a regular, systematic, rigorous and scientific system of data collection on trends and patterns of use?
Mr. Beall: There are four countries in the hemisphere that have made significant progress toward collecting data on national economic and social costs. The problem is that when I answer that way, it distorts the picture. Different countries have information on different questions that is of much higher quality than one would expect. For instance, Colombia produces certain kinds of information on money laundering that is better than from anywhere else.
On a very general level, countries such as the U.S., Canada, Mexico and Chile are quite advanced, but not so advanced, in some instances, as my stating it that way might lead you to believe. What is available on certain things in certain places is often quite surprising. For example, you are likely to find the real answers to what matters in alternative development in places like Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, and not in the U.S.
The Chairman: I ask you that question because the last national survey on drug use and trends in Canada was done in 1994. I am anxious to hear your opinion on the quality and accuracy of Canadian information.
Mr. Beall: What comes out of this report is surprising. If you look at Canada in comparison to Nicaragua, you will quickly spot the identity of the country, but you will not see a differentiation in the filtering mechanism. In other words, the content of the report, the way it is constructed and the sense that you get of that country is the same in both cases, I think. On the other hand, the quality of information from each country is quite different. The extra ingredient is the expertise of government officials.
Canada's submissions to this process are done with a great deal of care. Speaking as an individual who has watched the process very carefully, I would say that experts pay a lot of attention to what Canada says because of the degree of care that goes into the responses. I am using the phrase ``degree of care.'' A high degree of care does not always result in all the information you want. Those are two different things.
The Chairman: You have talked at length about law and respect for it and you referred to the behaviour of the population. How would you evaluate or qualify the behaviour of the population toward the corpus of drug law in Canada? How would you rate respect for the law, keeping in mind that 1.5 million Canadians annually use marijuana? Is that disrespectful behaviour that we should look into and try to understand? How would you qualify that disrespect for the law?
Mr. Beall: I used the word ``behaviour'' because, in the end, individuals react to the people and the circumstances around them according to interior lights. I think that generally speaking, respect for law in Canada is very high.
The Chairman: We believe that, too, although not on the subject matter of our concern. On that one, the population is not respectful of the law.
Mr. Beall: You asked my opinion, and my opinion is that the population is very respectful of the law.
I work in a multilateral setting, and I know that is not the case in the entire hemisphere. In some countries, justice has a very difficult time asserting itself on matters that are far different from decisions on whether or not to enjoy a particular substance. However, reverence for the law on a given subject ends up affecting the consideration of everything else. Where the law in general begins to fall into disrepute, then ordinary civic order becomes much more difficult to maintain, and once again you end up in a position where things that may not nominally be associated with drugs end up being affected by them or affecting them — both.
I would call behaviour and the law ``first consequences.'' Whenever the law and behaviour begin to move apart, if the gap gets too wide, then the damage is not only to individuals and communities, but also to the concept of the law itself. There is always a need to be measuring that.
The Chairman: As Canadians, we are looking at our numbers and the attitudes toward our laws. To us, 1.5 million Canadians disobeying a law is not respectful behaviour.
Do you your indicators contain a description of the information on drugs given to the population?
Mr. Beall: Yes.
The Chairman: How do you rate Canada's? We think that a well-informed population is key to any solution.
Mr. Beall: The recommendation that I think partially responds to your question was to develop a national monitoring centre on drug abuse to gather information on the municipal, provincial, territorial and federal levels, including information about NGO-administered programs. Our reaction to Canada's fulfilment of that recommendation was as follows:
Canada informs that the establishment of a national monitoring centre on drug abuse is made difficult by its political structure, given that responsibility for the delivery of health care services and education rests with provincial and territorial governments. In order to overcome such difficulties, however, a clearinghouse has been established under the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse, a national NGO mandated to provide a centralized source of information on alcohol and other drugs.
The CCSA is one more expression of the interest in observatories. That is, it is an indication of the interest in having an institution that can be interrogated on different aspects with the likelihood that you will get some pretty good factual responses, and, perhaps even more importantly in the long run, sources of information on follow-up questions.
The Chairman: The goal is, first to gather the information. That was mentioned in both the proposal by the Canadian government and your recommendation. However, it is not only that, it is to disseminate that information.
Mr. Beall: Exactly.
The Chairman: It is important to make it available and ensure that those who should be informed are.
Mr. Beall: That is exactly right. That is why the last line said that it was mandated to provide a centralized source of information to Canadians.
I stated earlier that we expect some very powerful medical conclusions in the coming years. Connected to that is finding out how information can be said to affect people. If $100 million is spent on a given campaign, what did you get out of it? How can you measure that?
Currently, our ability to deal with that question is well behind where we are medically, and that will probably continue to be the case for some time.
One of the reasons why the countries are all so interested in observatories, even though not all understand precisely what an observatory ought to do, is that people want to know the why and what matters. We are not yet very successful at that. It will take work.
The Chairman: Are you familiar with the tool that France developed to disseminate information on drugs? They edited and printed a small booklet for mainstream use. After a few months, millions of copies had been sold. The population paid for the book. Are you familiar with that?
Mr. Beall: I am not.
The Chairman: It was printed in French, and I do not know of any English version of such a booklet.
Mr. Beall: That is a very good example. This type of booklet is very widespread. All countries have them. Frankly, there are far more of them than there is likelihood that individuals will seek them out. Any book that sells in the millions in a country the size of France ought to be examined.
The Chairman: That is why I am asking you the question.
Mr. Beall: I was not aware of that, but I am now. If you have a copy, I will take it with me.
The Chairman: We will give you a copy before you leave. It was so valuable that in Quebec, one of our provinces, the government decided to publish their own booklet. They adapted the book to our Canadian reality.
Senator Maheu: I would like to move on to a topic upon which we have yet to touch. The last annual report of the INCB talked about the Internet, of which they were very critical. We heard earlier from DFAIT that recipes for chemical production are quite easily accessible on the Internet. Have the Americans discussed this? Have they tried to address the problems of the Internet? If so, have they come up with anything?
Are any of the members getting anywhere with this? Every country is wrestling with it. Is there anything out there so far that has been successful?
Mr. Beall: That has not been raised in CICAD, but it could be at any time. I suspect that it will be. The Internet only dates effectively from 1990, which is a very short time ago. To go from nothing to being as ubiquitous as the Net is today in the space of 10 years is an astonishing thing. Globally, nothing like that has ever happened before.
Developments that used to occur in one place and migrate very slowly across oceans, now hop around the world in a matter of weeks. The Internet issue will be but one expression of how countries deal with the fact that this kind of information, which used to be available only in the sanctity of university laboratories, is now available anywhere. That is not going to change.
You are raising a very valid question. How will we deal with that? We are becoming sensitive to it very quickly.
At the original negotiations, we did not have an indicator for what is called ``displacement.'' In 1998 and 1999, especially 1998, no one was talking about displacement. Since then, that term has come to have a good deal of meaning in the Andes and elsewhere.
The countries' focus on information will surely lead them into the Internet. There is no question about it. However, they will go in frustrated.
The Chairman: In your remarks you said that if the law is maladjusted, all elements of the system suffer. Would you say that current laws on cannabis are well adjusted or maladjusted in the hemisphere?
Mr. Beall: Again, it depends on where you are.
The Chairman: Let us say Canada.
Mr. Beall: I am not sufficiently familiar with Canada to know.
The Chairman: Let us say the U.S.
Mr. Beall: I will give a different example. Brazil is presently considering a law that will remove criminal penalties for marijuana use and create higher penalties for traffickers. In the Brazilian context, this is a very significant shift.
It is universally recognized that the imprisonment of users ends up contributing to the problem. It is not a solution; it is a complication. The general concern — and this was very openly voiced in Vienna last week — of smaller countries is how to deal with the problem without reinforcing associated effects. If you make a change, it needs to be in such a way that it does not, through secondary effects or unintended consequences, make the problems worse. When that was coming from countries where resources are short in every sense of the word, you could not help but pay attention to what they were saying.
My answer is that this is a part of the law that is going to change, in the sense that what the law does with an individual who is consuming something is ultimately going to have to be adjusted to the reality of that consumption. Here we are talking about a certain product, but the same question arises in other areas. If we are talking about cigarettes, which are legal in any volume, society faces the question of who pays the cancer treatment bill. Whose responsibility is that?
Whether or not we are talking about such things as punishment, the effects of consumption will be evaluated by society, by individuals, by communities, and the law will react. It depends on knowing what is actually taking place. We have talked about the dichotomy of personal freedom and how the effect that I have on others limits those freedoms. Every one of our applications, whether it is a teaching application or a penal application, must be looked at in terms of its effects on the problem. Did it do what it was designed to do? Is this bringing down the costs and the damage?
Senator Banks: Every law or change in regulation has unforeseen effects. You are widely experienced in these questions. I will ask you a personal question. I want your personal view, not that of CICAD or OAS.
You gave an example a few minutes ago of public behaviour and the law not moving together, and said when the gap gets too wide, serious problems result. Rather than either the law chasing public behaviour and conforming to it, which some people would regard as simply giving up, or getting out the whip, becoming repressive and driving the people back to loving the law, is there a third alternative we should try?
There is demonstrable, irrefutable disrespect for the law in the recreational use of cannabis on a very casual and occasional basis by large numbers of people. The majesty of the law occupies a very important place in the minds of most Canadians, but in that one respect, a significant number have a disregard for the law, and that is a problem. What would you do?
Mr. Beall: What we do must be part of what we learn. If we jump into these kinds of questions with answers based on what we brought with us, we will make a mistake.
Senator Banks: We have already done that. The current law in North America could reasonably be characterized, notwithstanding the way in which it is implemented, as repressive; it is based upon prohibition and interdiction. That law was arrived at on a constituent basis of some kind by people who believed they knew, God forbid, the truth. They are convinced of that, and we heard very compelling arguments from people to that effect. Those arguments are hard to contend against, as is any argument based on a literal belief. If you take the puritanical view, from which it could reasonably be said our present laws are derived, those people believed they were fully informed and right, and they still do. Just to be fair, some still do.
Mr. Beall: I am not quite sure how to respond to that. God will grant us the truth if we choose to look for it, but very few truths are immutable. We have a hard time accepting that because we want things to be true. It is a very convenient starting point.
Everything we are doing needs to be tested against experience. Societies, even fairly primitive ones, are subject to influences in number and force that was unimaginable 150 years ago. Despite what I said about the law, it is also true that the ordinary citizen here in Canada, as well as elsewhere, is bombarded constantly with messages to take all kinds of things. The number and frequency of those messages is quite forceful, especially for people whose only formation is what I would call ``telekinetic.'' Because of our nature, we tend to be short-term in our responses, but the effects tend to be the opposite.
Regardless of my degree of conviction about any particular truth, it is important that what I am doing be examined in the light of the consequences that I am predicting. Any breach has to be accounted for sooner or later. Quite obviously, even if I am right in the short term — for the first 10 years I seem to be getting what I want — that may not be the case 25 years later. In all the things that we are doing, we have got to be willing to stick with it.
There was a conscious effort in the U.S. in about 1963 or 1964 to persuade the public not to use nicotine. Although it enjoyed high-level promotion, it did not have what I would call ``Hollywood impacts,'' although after a while, it was noticed that every year the consumption of tobacco products was going down by 1 per cent. Continued over a number of years, that takes you where you want to go. It may not have been a very efficient vehicle, but it worked. That is, it worked until about three years ago. Suddenly, the curve began to go up again. Even when it looks as though you have it right, you have to keep working at it. That is especially true for substances as powerful and universal as the ones we are talking about.
Frankly, you are looking at a time when people will be taking substances recreationally because a certain effect can be had. Fooling around with marijuana is a very untargeted way of doing that. It is not efficient in the way that most steam engines are not efficient. If you want to be seriously efficient, you get rid of all the wastes and just use the things that work inside the body. That is coming.
It is already happening throughout the hemisphere. We are seeing a rise in the consumption of synthetic drugs in centres of production of organic drugs. It is critically important to grasp that what we are seeing now will not last. Rather, there will be something else quite different and in a totally different context from what obtained not so many years ago.
As far as marijuana is concerned, THC or something like it will be into the market and into people's systems in a flash.
Senator Banks: That is inescapable, is it not? We know that that will happen.
Mr. Beall: Yes.
Senator Banks: We have seen it happen before.
Mr. Beall: Yes. Dealing with it is important.
Senator Banks: Prohibition of anything has never worked anywhere. The war on drugs is lost by its very nature — as you said, it will change next Thursday afternoon and then again the following Tuesday.
Comment on those two perceptions, please.
Mr. Beall: The words ``prohibition'' and `` war'' are close to absolute, and absolutes are seldom satisfying in the long run. It does not seem to have done the cause of interest in humanity any good to characterize opposition to drugs as a ``war.'' Typically, although not always, wars are fought to be won by one side or the other, which means there will be an elimination.
It is unlikely that we will eliminate some of the history that you heard this morning from Professor McAllister, for example. He was quite convincing when he stated that it is all just part of being human. We will continue to face it.
Legal prohibition states that there are certain things you cannot do. No matter how forcefully the law states itself, some of those things will still be done. Then the law also provides for either remedy or compensation. That will also remain true. For me, the issue is not to prohibit or to pronounce a war, but to state or project this in such a way that individuals, their families and their communities make sensible decisions about what they do with their lives. That is what we have to aim for.
The trouble with prohibition is that, in the end, it has an arbitrary effect.
The more something seems arbitrary, the more people will challenge it.
The Chairman: As with adolescents.
Mr. Beall: Yes. It is not in the interests of the law to be constantly challenging the imagination of young people, but rather to bring understanding. It is a serious business.
You heard a little of that this morning too. Given a particular individual's biochemistry, a particular substance may or may not have any effect. A substance may be benign for me but deadly for you. That is a reality. People must learn to think with complexity because of the milieu in which we all live.
It is not difficult — this has been said before too — to state a proper answer to the issue of marijuana that makes all happy. Marijuana is no different from other things. You look at the damage it does or does not do and react accordingly.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Beall. We will give you a copy of the French book and the Québec book, which are both in French. It will be up to you to have them translated.
[Translation]
Today we have completed the inventory of both Canadian and foreign knowledge of cannabis under the efficient leadership of the research director, Dr. Sansfaçon. We have collected masses of knowledge! I take this opportunity to thank all the researchers who contributed to this effort, and more specifically Mr. Gérald Lafrenière and Ms. Chantal Collin, both from the Parliamentary Research Branch of the Library of Parliament.
However, two important aspects I referred to earlier remain incomplete. First, despite serious efforts to accommodate them, it has not yet been possible to hear the American federal authorities. We remain confident that we will meet with them and reiterate our request for their appearance. Second, we wish to hear the Canadian federal government political representatives, which will be done on June 10.
I also take this opportunity to thank our interpreters and stenographers for understanding the fundamental message of our discussions.
The second phase of our proceedings will begin shortly. In April, May and June, we will travel across Canada to gather the opinions of Canadians on cannabis. A brief synthesis of our scientific findings is being drafted and will be available shortly. You will then be informed of the locations and dates of our Canada-wide hearings.
Before adjourning this session of the committee, I would like to thank our clerk, Mr. Blair Armitage, as well as all the members of his team, who adequately organized the proceedings throughout the past year and a half.
If you are interested in the committee's proceedings, you can read about the issue of illegal drugs on our web site at the following address: www.parl.gc.ca. This site includes the presentations of all our witnesses, their biographies, and all the supporting documents they deemed necessary to provide. It also includes more than 150 Internet links relating to illegal drugs. You can also use this address to provide your comments or ask questions.
On behalf of the Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, I wish to thank you for your interest in our important research.
The committee adjourned.