POT SMOKERS DON'T LOOT AND RIOT

Maybe We Should Raise The Drinking Age And Legalize Marijuana

I stepped outside my front door the other afternoon and inhaled what
should have been clean, fresh air but which turned out to be a cloud
of marijuana.

Not just a whiff of grass, but a big strong lungful.

If you had been me, you would have been looking around the corner for
the smoker and wondering how he could have run away so quickly.

I, of course, knew better.

We've lived on our street for eight years and have seen -- or rather,
smelled -- the way air currents carry scents from the wooded park
behind us, up and over the house and deliver them at the front door
like junk mail.

Long ago, we discovered to our sorrow that our neighbouring park is a
mecca for youthful dope smokers and drinkers.

From their wooded hideaway, they can see out, but it's hard to see in.

Certainly, none of the homeowners can see them from their yards. We
might never have known without the wayward breeze that brings the
unmistakable odour.

Drinkers, on the other hand, are loud and they tend to do their
drinking -- and the accompanying yelling and fighting and smashing of
glass -- at night after everyone is in bed, and in nice weather they
show up on a regular basis, too.

But unlike the smokers, you can't miss them.

They're noisy and dirty.

Our neighbourhood park, which looks so dense and verdant from a
distance, is right now full of broken glass and pop cans and all the
other rubbish that rampaging kids and/or adults leave behind.

Once, during one of his regular park cleanups, my husband found a
whole heap of scratch 'n' win lottery tickets (all scratched) which
the police told him had been stolen from a local drug store.

I was thinking about our regular visitors the other day when I read
about the Canada Day riot in Edmonton.

As many as 2000 Canada Day party-goers, fuelled by plenty of alcohol,
rampaged through a high-end Edmonton neighbourhood, smashing windows
and destroying property.

Some of them were singing O Canada as they spilled out of the bars
when they closed at 2 a.m. and began to create mayhem. There were 20
arrests and several injured police, including two whose bike helmets
were cracked by chunks of flying concrete.

One of the rioters was bitten by a police dog while resisting arrest.
His photo appeared in a number of newspapers, his arm, on which a
largish German shepherd was chowing down, clearly visible. "It was,"
one officer said, "a bad, bad night."

Booze will do that, won't it?

Now what do you suppose it would have been like if everyone in
Edmonton had been smoking all evening?

You and I know the answer to that one: By 2 a.m., everyone would have
been asleep.

For that is one of the positive results of marijuana use: You seldom
see a smoker turn ugly.

Mellow, yes.

Boring, yes.

Unpleasant, no. Booze, on the other hand, leads to nothing but trouble.

Always has. Just ask the Edmonton police, or the residents and
shopkeepers of the Old Strathcona neighbourhood where windows were
smashed and shops looted on Canada Day.

Hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage was done and few
businesses in the area escaped.

By the time it was all over, 95 officers were involved and only
succeeded in calming things by using that old standby, pepper spray.
Now I'm not saying marijuana is a good thing. I'm sure it's addictive
and I'm also sure it can't be good for your lungs.

Ever seen a joint with a filter tip?

And I'm also not saying I approve of kids holing up in a park to do dope.

But I am saying booze is bad -- for the troublemakers in Edmonton;
for the bozos who wander into my backyard clutching a bottle.

Although I certainly don't condone trespassing, I'd really rather
have kids smoking marijuana down in my park any day ahead of youthful
dim bulbs with nothing better to do than suck down booze and trash
private property.

The boozers are apt to do anything; the dope smokers cause no
problems (unless you count the possibility of a small forest fire.)

If I were in charge of the laws of this land, I'd raise the drinking
age to 21 and decriminalize marijuana possession.

Isn't it time we stopped talking about it and did something?