Local police officer takes a stand against drug prohibition

David Bratzer and I share at least one opinion in common: That it costs us a pointless fortune to maintain the charade of having effective drug laws in Canada.
Me holding that opinion: No big deal. Anyone who knows the kind of things I write about wouldn’t be too surprised to discover I’m of the belief that Canada and the U.S. have made a complete hash of things by treating a health and social issue like a criminal matter.
But Bratzer holding that opinion: That’s just a little different. He’s a Victoria police officer - the one tasked with enforcing those laws.
I suspect there are many more who think like Const. Bratzer inside the department, as you’d expect would happen to anyone tasked with patrolling Victoria’s ridiculous streets for any length of time. But it’s still not a view that’s expressed publicly by police very often.
In fact, Bratzer is one of only two active police officers in Canada who does public speaking on behalf of the U.S.-based non-profit, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP). He signed on three months ago after clearing it with his boss, and now aims to put some of his off-hours to use speaking to people about why drug prohibition doesn’t work.
“LEAP’s position is that a lot of the problems we’re seeing aren’t caused by drugs, but rather the unintended consequences of drug prohibition,” says Bratzer, citing public-health problems, violence and a gang-controlled drug market as examples of that.
Bratzer came to the same conclusion after three years of policing the streets of Victoria.
“The effort that we put into chasing drugs - it’s bottomless,” he says. “Canadians have put billions and billions into fighting the war on drugs, but at the end of the day they’re cheaper, more potent and more available than ever before.”
Wanting an end to prohibition has nothing to do with liking drug abuse, notes Bratzer. But ceding control of an arbitrary assortment of drugs to gangs and criminals simply isn’t working as a strategy. The LEAP Web site (www.leap.cc) tracks U.S. “drug war” spending by the minute; at $2,000 every 60 seconds, spending for 2008 is already more than $46 billion.
Canada doesn’t officially have a war on drugs, with federal authorities preferring to describe our efforts as “demand and availability reduction.” We’re not quite so jail-crazy, nor so prone to lock up people indefinitely at great cost and to little effect.
But we still spend a heck of a lot on drug enforcement in Canada - more than half a billion dollars a year. And if the goal of all that spending is to wipe out trafficking and the use of illegal drugs, then anyone with eyes and 15 minutes to hang out in the downtown can see that it’s not working.
“The LEAP strategy is to build a bureau of speakers modelled on ‘Vietnam Vets Against the War.’ That group was effective because they had the credibility of having been there,” says Bratzer. “What LEAP believes is that once people hear from those in law enforcement about the multiple harms caused by drug prohibition, they’ll change their minds.”
Bratzer is careful to point out that his views are his own, and not those of the Victoria Police Department. He also stresses that the solutions lie in slow, measured steps that remove drug laws and replace them with good public policy.
“I don’t support drug abuse, and I don’t support breaking the law. I know it all has to be about baby steps,” says Bratzer. “My message to the marijuana lobby is to aim higher, because if marijuana becomes legal but all the others remain the way they are, there’s still a lot of harm being done.”
Bratzer’s view is that “soft” drugs should be taxed and sold, similar to alcohol and tobacco. Harder drugs such as cocaine and heroin would be available as prescription drugs, and “consumed in a monitored site” as part of a harm-reduction program.
“I think every doctors’ office should be a needle exchange,” he adds.
Bratzer knows his decision to go public with his views might not sit well with some of his co-workers at the department. As of this week, he’s also got a new boss to consider: Chief Jamie Graham.
“I’m not saying police should stop being police,” says Bratzer. “I have a lot of respect for my fellow police officers, and am not trying to shove this down their throat.
“But at the end of the day, I didn’t want to work as a police officer for 30 years and end up feeling like this was an issue I should have spoken up about sooner.”

Choosing death ought to be our right
June 15, 2007

With any luck, I’ll live long enough to see this country do something brave around making it easier for people to choose death.
I respect all sides of the issue. There are some really terrifying possibilities any time it becomes socially acceptable for one group of humans to kill another.
But let’s just start with one thing, then: That an old and failing person ought to have the right to die gracefully and painlessly, at a time of their choosing. Surely we can agree on that.
I don’t think a lot about death, but it crosses my mind from time to time. For instance, I’m currently reflecting on whether I still want to be cremated, or am starting to favour being planted au natural in some beautiful forest.
People generally don’t have much say over how they die, so I won’t indulge in any vanities about how much control I will or won’t have over my own life when it’s my time to die. I know death comes from unexpected directions.
I can live with that. What scares me is imagining being in the same position as the 93-year-old Vernon woman who made the news this week after her doctor was convicted of trying to help her commit suicide.
The woman managed to secure a lethal dose of pills for herself. But staff at facility where she stayed found out before she could take the pills. They stopped her.
I think we’re supposed to be happy that her life was saved. Instead, I find myself nervous at the reminder of how tough it still is for people to die with dignity.
If it were up to me, I would have a death like in the Dutch movie Antonia’s Line - holding court with one loved one after another in a long and final farewell.
My dad’s oldest sister had a death very much like that. I still remember her resplendent in her white negligee, inviting each of us into her bedroom in her final weeks for a last warm word. It seemed a perfect death, if there could be such a thing.
But here we are eight years later, convicting a doctor for trying to help another tired old lady die sooner rather than later. And I realize how tenuous it all is.
I can strive to die like my aunt. But I could just as easily end up stuck someplace where nobody knows how important it is for me to have some control over my death, and end up living long enough to see my doctor convicted of trying to help me out.
The laws needn’t be sweeping. We don’t need to get into abortion, or any actions that might lead to people dying who aren’t ready to die.
But an old person grown too tired and sick to live anymore - that’s a different matter. There has to be a way to create laws that maintain respect for the right to life overall while making exceptions for personal choice at the end of life.
In some cases, there’s nothing wrong with choosing death over life. We accept that in theory. More than seven out of 10 of Canadians polled last week by Ipsos-Reid came out in support of the right to die.
In practice, it all depends.
If your type of death involves a great deal of pain, your chances of getting enough legal medication to kill you is more of a possibility. If you’re dying of less dramatic causes and without much pain, you could linger for years.
You can do things like living wills, or pieces like this one so that nobody ever thinks for a moment that you’d choose to be kept alive at any cost.
But what kind of a guarantee is that? Until Canadian law enshrines some mechanism that gives people the right to die under certain circumstances, even the best-laid plans can go awry. Next thing you know, they’re “saving” your life and trying to send your doctor to jail.
Ultimately, the problem seems to be that we can’t shake the feeling that nobody sane would ever choose to die. In fact, we all die. We deserve the chance to exercise at least a modicum of control over how it goes.
We had a heck of a time registering gun owners, and I imagine that endorsing the right to die could be even more paralysing. But we can’t ignore the issue for much longer.
Not when three-quarters of Canadians surveyed say they support the right to die. Not when doctors still risk criminal records for giving their patients a helping hand.
When time ran out for my mom’s old dog Jake, the vet came by the house and shot him up with something that sent him into a gentle, happy stupor, and then deep sleep. When it came to the final needle, he didn’t even notice.
It was a great way to go. I can only hope for the same.

Derik Lord's long wait

The tale of two foolish teenage boys hired to carry out a murder that was supposed to make them rich is a veritable Aesop’s fable in terms of the obvious moral of the story.
One of the boys admitted his guilt from the outset, and did what the system required of him during 10 years in prison. In return for his good behaviour, David Muir was granted parole five years ago for the two murders he helped carry out in 1990.
The other has steadfastly denied his guilt. He has refused to take required prison programs, and his father has developed into a notorious agitator who infuriates prison officials. So Derik Lord remains in jail, denied parole for a fourth time last month.
The moral: Things go better for people who accept responsibility. Unfortunately for Lord, the opportunity to act accordingly just may have passed.
Lord, Muir and pal Darren Huenemann were teen friends in Saanich when they were convicted in 1992 of carrying out the murders of Darren’s mother and grandmother at the older woman’s Tsawwassen home.
Nobody who knew them could believe it at first. But prosecutors headed into trial with some significant evidence. Included were tapes of a flurry of phone calls between the boys after police told Muir they had a witness who could place the boy - then just 15 - in Tsawwassen at the time of the murders.
Prosecutors also had Huenemann’s young girlfriend, who had a damning story of picking the boys up at the Swartz Bay ferry terminal and hearing of the events of that night.
And then there was the story told by Muir. He told police that he and Lord had been hired by Huenemann to kill the teenager’s mother and grandmother. Huenemann stood to inherit $4 million from their deaths, and had promised to share his newfound fortune with his friends.
In Lord’s version, all three boys were at the Lord family home at 8:30 p.m. on the night of the murders, which meant they couldn’t have been in Tsawwassen. It’s an all-or-nothing story. To believe Lord, you have to believe that none of the boys were guilty - even though Muir confessed to everything.
Derik’s mother Elouise backs up her son. She says she was at home that night and saw all three boys in the basement. Derik’s father David, while not there that night, ferociously adheres to the same story, sometimes to the point of getting himself thrown in jail for protesting some aspect of his son’s incarceration.
Law-abiding before Derik’s conviction, David has turned into something of a chronic troublemaker in the intervening years. When I visited the family six years ago, David joked that his tombstone would read “Well-known to police.”
I had gone to Chilliwack to interview the family , where they’d moved from Saanich years earlier to be closer to Derik at Matsqui penitentiary. The parents were resolutely convinced of Derik’s innocence, and still are.
The irony is that their need to believe that Derik doesn’t deserve to be in prison ensures that he’ll never get out.
It also guarantees the worst kind of prison time. Any time somebody in charge grows weary of Derik’s ongoing refusal to admit his guilt, he’s dispatched to a tougher prison as punishment. The 33-year-old had worked his way into a healing-style aboriginal prison by the time of his last bid for parole. Now, he’s back behind bars in Matsqui.
How will it end for Lord? Possibly with a genuine lifetime in jail if he continues to deny the murders. The system may have grown more sensitive to allegations of wrongful conviction, but not in a case where only one of the three men convicted is continuing to deny the trio’s crime.
I got an anonymous e-mail the last time I wrote about Lord in 2001, declaring that Lord was very much guilty as charged no matter what he said.
I think he likely is. But it would be a tremendously hard confession for him to make now, given that his parents have spent the last 10 years and every nickel of their savings on asserting his innocence.
They believe in his innocence, and I sometimes think he has ended up convincing himself of that as well. But if you can’t admit guilt, you stay in jail. And so it goes for Derik Lord.
No one is well-served by keeping Lord in prison. Jails are expensive, and not known for their positive impacts. If Lord was a violent young man, he hasn’t stayed that way, and seems like the kind of guy who’d lead a quiet life far from the public eye if ever released.
But the stories a family tells itself sometimes take on lives of their own, and pretty soon there’s no turning back. The burden of the lie just may be Lord’s to bear for a lifetime.