Alexander’s second major explanation for the continued emphasis on the enforcement dominated approach to drug control in Canada is that the “war on drugs” serves as proxy for the more fundamental conflict between the need for social control and the desire for personal autonomy. In this case, drug warriors personify the need to promote social control while resisters embody the desire for personal power and autonomy.²² According to Alexander:

People seem to resolve the dilemma of mutually exclusive needs for personal autonomy and societal control by embracing one of these compulsively, while angrily denying the other. Illicit drugs are ideal targets for people who fear individual autonomy (i.e., drug warriors), because drugs have a real potential to increase personal power against social control, at least temporarily. When used at the right time, drugs like LSD and marijuana really do facilitate extraordinary, marvelous ways of seeing the world, as testified by serious intellectuals like Aldous Huxley (1963) (Alexander 1990:336).

The major participants in the “war on drugs” rarely admit that their battle is a reflection of the conflict between social control and individual autonomy, however. Alexander observes that “rather than argue directly against the desirability of personal power and autonomy, the rhetoric of drug warriors obscures the underlying issue by incessantly denying that the personal empowering use of illicit drugs is possible. Instead, drug war propaganda attributes great power to drugs, but claims that drugs appropriate this power themselves by inevitably causing users to ‘lose control’” (Alexander 1990:337).²³

Alexander’s astute observations are confirmed over and over in the presentations made by the enforcement lobby in policymaking forums. For example, in a recent policy brief presented to the Senate Special Committee on Illegal Drugs, the Canadian Police Association (CPA) wrote:

Drugs are not dangerous because they are illegal, drugs are illegal because they are dangerous. There is no such thing as “hard drugs” and “soft drugs,” nor bona-fide criteria to differentiate between these terms. People who refer to hard or soft drugs generally do not understand the truth about drugs, or are seeking to soften attitudes towards the use of certain illicit drugs. Generally, cannabis and its derivative products are described in this context to distance the drug from the recognized harm associated with other illegal drugs. This has been a successful, yet dangerous approach, and contributes to the misinformation, misunderstanding, and increasing tolerance associated with marijuana use (CPA 2001).

This quote clearly demonstrates the tendency of the enforcement bureaucracy to deny any functional use of illicit drugs, even though millions of people use drugs like cannabis every year with little or no indication of dysfunction.²⁴
In assessing the contribution of social control to the continued dominance of supply-side drug control policies, then, I would suggest that social control is a less significant influence but that its explanatory power is enhanced to some degree because it acts indirectly through bureaucratic imperatives. That is, the need for social control is a contributing factor in the anti-drug efforts of the “bureaucratic enforcement complex.”

²² There is little doubt that the enforcement lobby believes that the use of illicit drugs constitutes a direct and significant threat to the social order. For example, in a recent brief presented to the Senate Special Committee on illegal drugs, the Canadian Policy Association stated that “the proliferation of illegal drugs remains a serious problem in North American society. Illegal drug use is a significant contributing factor in a wide range of crimes, including property offences, crimes of violence, robbery, prostitution, and organized crime gangs” (CPA 2001).
²³ For their own part, many resisters also side-step the underlying issue by suggesting that all drug use is functional, which is just as unrealistic as the drug warriors suggesting that all illicit drug use is dysfunctional.
²⁴ The tendency to classify all illicit drug use as dysfunctional appears to be less pronounced outside of North America. At a recent international conference on corrections and addiction in PEI, I was struck by the fact that many European countries have a much more sophisticated classification scheme for drug users that includes a distinction between those who are addicted but not overtly involved in criminal activities, and those who are what they call “criminally addicted.” In North American jurisdictions, such distinctions seem to be lacking due to a general tendency to categorize all drug use under the same level of dangerousness.