FOOLISH WAR ON DRUGS CREATED TO BE CONTINUOUS

Editor:

Re: Christopher Foulds' column of Nov. 12 ('Not all drugs are equal:
How about legal pot?'):

Taking the pot business out of the hands of teens and criminals and
putting it into the hands of responsible adults is socially conservative.

Generating tax revenue from that industry is fiscally conservative,
and using that money to teach kids why they should avoid drugs is
morally conservative.

Foulds wonders why the government won't legalize pot when it is
clearly the "conservative" thing to do.

Since Al Capone had a lot of high-ranking law-enforcement and
government officials on his payroll, that may offer a clue as to our
current government's behaviour. Could the government be in cahoots
with organized crime? It has happened before.

Or maybe the government wants to keep pot illegal so they can justify
hiring more cops and building more jails.

If they legalized pot, crime would drop, alcohol and hard-drug use
would drop, use of pharmaceuticals would drop, our federal budget
surplus would go up and Canadians would start demanding social
programs, decent schools and health care, and environmental cleanup.

When one considers that junk food will kill many times more Canadians
than all illegal drugs combined, it is hard to think of drugs as the
"epidemic" that the media, government, and police have hyped it into.

Yet they keep at it, and this convinces the public (who, for the most
part, aren't really paying that close attention anyway) that it is
absolutely necessary to have a cop on every street corner and to
curtail civil rights and liberties.

Cops, government and gangsters get more money and more power, and the
rest of us suffer. The war on drugs was never about drugs. It is a
war on personal freedom.

And this war was never meant to be won - it was meant to be continuous.

Russell Barth

Federal Medical Marijuana License Holder

Ottawa