In assessing the contribution of hidden agendas to the continued supply side bias of Canadian drug control policy, it is necessary to link this potential explanation to the exportation of the US war on drugs explanation considered above. In other words, it is possible that these hidden agendas, if they exist, may be at least partly behind the aggressive attempts of the US national government to pressure Canada into maintain its current prohibitionist approach to drug control.

Distributive Politics. In a short but insightful essay, Boyum (1998) offers a compelling explanation for the continued dominance of the enforcement-centred approach to drug control in democratic countries like the US and Canada. According to his analysis, this outcome can be explained by answering one simple question: who benefits from which policy? He writes:

As a first step towards a political understanding of drug policy, take what is probably the most common policy advice of academic experts: that we should spend less on enforcement and more on treatment. The chief benefit of vigorous drug enforcement is reduced drug use. The principal costs are public expenditures and the negative side effects of black markets. Now, as a thought experiment, consider how these benefits and costs stack up from the perspective of two types of communities: middle-class suburban towns and poor inner-city neighborhoods.

The probable answer is that inner cities would fare worse than suburbs under any drug policy, but that prohibition and zealous enforcement have magnified the difference. As evidence of this proposition, note that while alcohol abuse and alcohol-related violence are more common in poor neighborhoods, the distribution of these licit drug problems looks egalitarian when set against the distribution of illicit drug problems. This is hardly surprising: because harsh punishment of drug dealing makes it a risky and disreputable activity, we would expect drug markets to locate in those communities whose social structure is least resistant to them, and in which there are young men whose futures are sufficiently bleak to make drug dealing look like an opportunity. What all of this suggests is that an expansion in publicly funded drug treatment at the expense of drug enforcement is a bad deal for the middle class--at least when judged from the viewpoint of narrow self-interest. Drug enforcement offers the suburbanites considerable protection from drug abuse. Publicly supported treatment programs mainly serve poor addicts, who would clearly gain from additional funding.

While this analysis is far from a comprehensive account of why our drug policy so favors enforcement over treatment, it certainly makes the enforcement bent more understandable. It also, depending on one's perspective, makes current policy look more or less justifiable. That the overwhelming majority of Americans would find themselves ill-served by a shift in public resources from drug enforcement to drug treatment is not something that drug policy critics have told us, nor is it a small consideration in a democratic political system. On the other hand, if one believes that public policy should give disproportionate weight to the welfare of the least fortunate, our present drug policy is hard to defend (Boyum 1998).

In contrast to the potential explanations discussed so far, this explanation is an “unintended consequence” in that it is not based on the intentional activities of any groups or individuals involved in Canadian drug politics, but instead on the “normal” operation of the electoral process. In this sense it is a “tragedy” of the democratic process.²⁰ Assessing the contribution of this explanation to the continued supply-side bias in Canadian drug control policy is more tenuous because of its unintended nature. One could, however, gain insight into the validity of this explanation by collecting drug policy preference data from a sample of middle-class citizens and their inner-city counter parts. This data could then be combined with political participation data to confirm that the preferences of the middle-class (e.g., enforcement) are indeed being transferred to the political system, while those of the inner-city (e.g., publicly subsidized treatment), are not. For the purposes of this article, however, this explanation will be treated as “potentially significant but unverified.”

²⁰ I use the term tragedy in the same vein as Garret Hardin in his famous essay: “The Tragedy of the Commons.” According to Hardin the essential meaning of tragedy is “the remorseless workings of things.” In this case, no one intends that the enforcement-dominated approach to drug control wins out to the detriment of the inner-city poor, but this outcome is assured due to the normal operation of electoral politics.