WAR ON DRUGS HAS BENEFITS

Re: "Junk science," The NOW View, Friday, Jan. 19.

May I suggest that your newspaper's conclusion that the war on drugs
has produced little or no results ignores benefits that have
occurred, but that may not be obvious.

It is a fact that most of us have not lived in a time when drugs have
not been the focus of law enforcement. As such, we have no real
knowledge of what the world would be like without it. In my mind, it
would look a lot more like the Downtown Eastside and much less like
the Utopia your newspaper proclaims it to be. The fact is that the
enforcement of drug laws keeps our city streets at an acceptable
level of normalcy. Imagine if every shop you tried to enter had
someone doing drugs in front of it, or if taking your child to the
local park meant having to pass through people injecting drugs.

Secondly, to claim that the United States' war on drugs has been
unsuccessful is a bit misleading. The evidence shows that after they
started locking up large numbers of people for drug offenses, their
crime rate starting falling so fast that most experts were at a loss.
It quickly became apparent that those locked up for dealing or using
drugs also partook in various other crimes that they were not caught
for. Because of their incarceration for the drug offences for which
they were caught, they were effectively removed from the pool of
criminals on the street; a criminal in jail can commit no other crimes.

I hardly think that most Canadians would view a clean, orderly and
low-crime society as not being an acceptable result of the
prosecution of drug offences. Perhaps it was a bit inappropriate to
report on the Conservatives' new law and order plan so disparagingly.

Kevin Kupferschmid

Coquitlam