Article content continued

“My thinking was that in the 1960s, 70s and 80s the drug policies we had certainly weren’t working, but that’s when you had the full-throated war on drugs happening, and I was watching these pretty sad-soul clients of mine troop before the courts and go off to jail with very few treatment programs around. They (the police) would get the low-lying fruit, the street dealers, but not usually nabbing the big guys at the top of the pyramid of the drug trade. So I saw what we were doing was not going anywhere, but there was no appetite (to consider legalization) and certainly it was political suicide to talk about legalizing all drugs.”

Harcourt himself has been touched by the drug epidemic: His home was broken into three times despite an alarm system — on one occasion with the police finding heroin residue on the blanket the thief had used to muffle the breaking of an upstairs bedroom window.

“I think (the public conversation) has changed because it’s sunk in that it’s not working and that there’s a lot of waste. I think a lot of people are seeing now what a disaster it’s been. That’s obvious, but what do you do about it?”

Harcourt chose legalization. He did so reluctantly.

“When we talk (about legalization), realize I’m not enthusiastically advocating legalizing drugs. I hate anybody being addicted/enslaved to booze, cigarettes, legal or illegal pharmaceuticals. However, in public policy, choices a lot of the time aren’t between good, better and best. They’re usually between bad, worse and shittiest. So choosing between the failed war on drugs of the last 80 years (presumably, Harcourt was alluding to Prohibition and the criminalization of marijuana), or doing nothing and watching thousands die from fentanyl, or worse, laced heroin, cocaine or other drugs, then trying to regulate drug usage — like Portugal is doing, or Canada and Ecuador is doing with marijuana, leading towards moderate usage or abstinence — seems the best of a bad lot of choices. For example, Switzerland has a program for long term heroin addicts of heroin maintenance leading to abstinence. The program has a 71 per cent success rate. The personal, family and societal damage done by intemperate drug usage is huge. So it’s irresponsible to not try to deal with this area of human misbehaviour.”