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Canada:
Former
Vancouver
Top
Drug
Cop's
Study
Finds
Drug
Busts
Boost
Drug
Sales
5/20/05
In a prohibition paradox, crackdowns on retail drug dealers result in lower prices and increased drug sales, said Vancouver Police Inspector Kash Heed, a former head of the department's drug squad. The findings come not from Heed's "street sense," but from a study the sometime university lecturer completed to fulfill requirements for his masters degree at Simon Fraser University. Heed, who headed the drug squad from 2000 to 2003, became a critic of the war on drugs during that stint and won the respect of hard-nosed drug activists like Ann Livingston of the Vancouver Area Network of Drug Users and marijuana seed entrepreneur and activist Marc Emery, both of whom marked the end of his tenure with regret. Heed's research looked at 600 street-level drug dealers arrested in police crackdowns in Vancouver over an 18-month period. He found that instead of making drugs more difficult or more expensive to buy, just the opposite occurred. "The increased enforcement efforts have actually had a paradoxical effect," he told the Canadian Broadcasting System Monday. "When you take one group of traffickers off the street, there is a void that is filled almost right away by people who are wanting to get into the business, who are new traffickers that offer their drugs for less of a price than it was prior." While Heed told the CBC he supported Vancouver's Four Pillars approach to drug use -- prevention, treatment, harm reduction, and law enforcement -- he said the long term solution is to decriminalize drugs and shift resources to treatment. "I'm leaning towards this exploring some type of decriminalization policy and increasing the amount of treatment that would be available, and getting some intervention early on in the cycle that these criminals get involved in that leads to the proliferation of the problems on our streets."
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