If Vancouver’s gang wars are fuelled by drugs, the solution is to reduce consumption of illicit substances, the U.S consul general to Vancouver has said.

“So long as you have demand, it is an extremely difficult problem to deal with,” Phillip Chicola explained. “You may punish the people who are producing it, processing it, and marketing it. But as long as you have the kind of demand that we have in North American…you are never going to solve the drug problem.”

Chicola, who started with the U.S State Department in 1979, has dealt with drug policy before. In the late 1990s, he helped develop and implement the $1.3-billion Plan Colombia, a major component of the U.S. “war on drugs”. Later, he worked on the $900-million Andean Regional Initiative, which expanded many of Plan Colombia’s policies into other South American countries. Chicola was also the 1991 recipient of the Intelligence Collector of the Year Award.

In a wide-ranging interview at the office of the Georgia Straight, Chicola said that the U.S. government is “of course” watching the gang violence in Vancouver.

He conceded that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency has two agents stationed in Vancouver who perform liaison duties. “Most U.S. law enforcement agencies have relationships with Canadian law enforcement,” he added.

In an April 13 opinion piece in the Globe and Mail, Liberal MP Keith Martin (Esquimalt-Juan de Fuca) argued for the decriminalization of marijuana as a method to destabilize gangs.

Martin wrote: “The only beneficiaries of the status quo are the organized crime gangs that reap massive profits from the prohibition of this weed.”

Asked if decriminalization of soft drugs is a legitimate method to address demand, Chicola responded, “You can debate various strategies to deal with this. Do I think it is worthwhile? I have doubts about whether the user should be penalized.”

He stressed that both the U.S. and Canada need focus anti-drug trafficking policies on the producers, transporters, and marketers of hard drugs.

In the past, the U.S. administration has criticized Vancouver’s handling of the city’s drug problem. Under the presidency of George W. Bush, John Walters, then-national drug control policy director, described Vancouver’s safe injection site as “immoral” and “state-sponsored suicide”.

Chicola told the Straight that the White House’s new “drug czar”, as the position is often called, has not yet expressed himself on the issue. But if the U.S. continues to object to Insite under the Obama administration, concerns will be discussed “in a more acceptable way”.

You can follow Travis Lupick on Twitter at twitter.com/tlupick.