OUR HOME AND NAIVE LAND

During superb competition at the Beijing Olympics, it was heart
warming to see medal winners brimming with pride and joy and wrapping
themselves in their country's flag.

I will always treasure the moment when Canada's Carol Huynh, who
began her quest in tiny Hazelton, British Columbia, stood draped in
our Maple Leaf flag immediately after winning gold in women's
wrestling. With the playing of O Canada and the raising of the Maple
Leaf at the award ceremony, Carol Huynh was the essence of patriotism
and love of country. In that moment she reminded us that there is a
fundamental truth in the words "O Canada we stand on guard for thee."

And yet it caused me a moment of sadness over the behaviour of too
many parasitical citizens who stand on guard only for themselves as
they gnaw away at long-standing Canadian standards of morality and ethics.

Consider the case of 59-year-old Roy Sundstom: On Aug. 15, Judge
Carol Baird-Ellan ordered Sundstom to forfeit his $600,000 Sunshine
Coast property to the Crown. It contained a large, sophisticated,
heavily-protected and bunkered marijuana growing operation.

It was not for Canada that Sundstrom stood on guard as he
painstakingly and narcissistically created and operated a clandestine
cannabis grow-op. He and thousands of others like him wave their
marijuana leaf flag and sing their own national anthem which begins
and ends with "O Canada, it's all about me ..."

According to a July 22 BBC News report by Misha Glenny, the growing
of B.C. Bud is big business. Glenny interviewed RCMP Inspector Brian
Cantera, who estimated that there are 20,000 residential grow-ops in
British Columbia not including those in industrial locations and on
dope farms around the interior of the province.

"Inspector Cantera walked me around a cavernous warehouse somewhere
east of Vancouver where the RCMP lock up goods confiscated from
people involved in the drug trade. The most spectacular items are the
cars, speedboats and even helicopters which the traffickers use to
send the marijuana down to its biggest market across the 49th
parallel in the US.

"If Inspector Cantera's estimates are accurate, then British Columbia
is probably home to the largest concentration of organised criminal
syndicates in the world."

Just Google "B.C. Bud" and you will begin to understand how important
our west coast La-La Land is to organized international crime and
local amateur gangs jockeying for a bigger slice of the estimated
$6-billion annual take.

Imagine the delight of local gang leaders watching the goings-on in
Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, Canada's disgraceful de facto drug
legalization zone. They must laugh themselves silly over the
nurse-supervised injection site where junkies are assisted in
shooting up and comforted in the aftermath.

Think about the deepening quality of addiction each time a hypodermic
syringe containing illicit narcotics is jabbed into a vein, an act of
total self-centredness and abandonment of responsible citizenship.

And think about the fact that each injection of illicit narcotics can
be traced back to some act of thievery, thuggery or burglary.

In the public interest our federal government must challenge our
provincial health authority and fellow-travelling epidemiologists
over their campaign to nullify criminalization of illicit drugs with
the adoption of a provincial system of Orwellian regulation.

They would have us believe that chronic addiction is just the bad
luck of a brain disease over which the addict has no control, that
he/she is therefore neither accountable nor capable of abstinence and
is in need of endless therapy beginning with supervised injection.
Their ideology of addiction as a brain disease rules out
accountability and myriad decisions that addicts make as they go from
one injection to the next.

Addiction is all about bad choices, the totality of which is not a
brain disease.

Those who insist on medicalizing addiction demand that we purge the
stigma of a "junkie" using "junk," a "stoner" using "pot" and abolish
criminal penalties for drug-related conduct.

In our communities there is a constant ebb and flow of moral and
ethical perspectives that are absolutely essential in a civil
society. They must not be relinquished at the whining insistence of
today's therapist movement.

The presence of illicit drugs in our communities requires that we
remain judgmental and condemn those who harm themselves and their
families. It demands that we hold them morally accountable and
capable of doing better. We must never let personal accountability be
compromised.

I began with the amazing Carol Huynh.

I close with Eric Lamaze and his gold medal performance in equestrian
competition.

Lamaze was once a cocaine user. He endured the resulting stigma and a
ban from the sport he loved so much. Yet he remained an individual
who would make choices that freed him from cocaine and started him on
a path to an Olympic performance.

When Lamaze stood with gold medal in hand and tears in his eyes, it
gave special meaning to O Canada and the raising of our flag.