ANOTHER DRUG WAR VICTIM

IN his introduction to his classic Les Miserables, Victor Hugo said this:
"... so long as ignorance and misery remain on earth, books like this
cannot be useless."

Ignorance and misery are in no short supply in the tale of the latter day
Jean Valjean, Allen Richardson. I mean the ignorance, by turns, of an
American justice system and its war on drugs, and the capitulating Canadian
authorities. And, of course, the misery caused to a member of the North
Shore community and his gravely ill wife.

Almost 30 years ago, when only a boy of 19, Richardson, an ex-American,
became involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

Drugs, rock 'n' roll and political posturing were rites of passage and
certainly not unusual for scores of students.

He was then arrested for selling $20 worth of LSD to an undercover cop,
who, to my mind, was guilty of entrapment.

The middle-class youngster was sentenced to four years in jail. Not quite
the purgatory to which Victor Hugo's Jean Valjean was doomed, Attica was
still an extremely brutal place for a fresh-faced youth with no prior
convictions.

Christopher Perlstein, for that was his birth name, spent six weeks in
Attica. After being removed temporarily from the place he described as "a
medieval house of horrors," Perlstein was told he would be returning to
Attica, where 43 people had just been killed in the course of an uprising.

Perlstein bolted.

The broad and short of it is he found a home in Canada, assumed a new
identity, and has worked for almost 20 years for a UBC-affiliated research
facility where he was arrested the other day by the RCMP.

It seems Mr. Richardson's very own Javert (the dogged policeman who makes
it his life's mission to capture Jean Valjean for stealing a loaf of
bread), in the guise of the New York State Department of Corrections, has
finally caught up with him.

Mr. Richardson is expected to furnish the optics of victory for the
American "justice and the correctional services departments," by
surrendering and serving the remainder of his sentence in the U.S.
Immigration Canada ordered him to leave the country, stating Canada "can't
be perceived as a safe haven for criminals."

This order is now pending Richardson's refugee claim. It is offensive, I
know, to mention Christie Lamont and David Spencer in the same breath as a
law-abiding Canadian. But one would hope that a foreign minister that saw
fit to intervene on behalf of those bona fide Canadian criminals,
kidnappers of a Brazilian businessman, would, if extradition became a
threat, deploy the same diplomacy in the service of Richardson.

It is a sorry country that doesn't fight to keep Richardson within her
borders, yet welcomes onerous refugees like Fariba Mahmoodi, to name one.

Mahmoodi, who can sure work the system, not only swayed refugee boards, but
had the Human Rights Tribunal in raptures. This ignoble kangaroo court
failed to throw out the woman's allegations of sexual harassment against
UBC professor Don Dutton, in spite of her lengthy rap sheet: Mahmoodi
allegedly committed welfare fraud, defrauded the university, forged
academic and reference documents, and attempted to ensnare three other male
faculty members.

Due process, real rules of evidence, and witness credibility issues were
tossed to the wind, and Mahmoodi was awarded restorative payment for having
endured a sexualized environment of Dr. Dutton's making.

She may be welcome in Canada, but how does a person, who pens a threatening
letter so full of fractured phrases and tortured syntax, linger in any
institute of higher learning?

If it accepts the likes of Mahmoodi, then UBC and she are perfect bedmates.

Dr. Dutton, for his part, was not entirely averse to consorting with her,
and thus stands accused of taking delight in a seemingly malevolent and
vapid woman.

With that off my chest, let me conclude my defence of Mr. Richardson.

It should come as no surprise that Richardson has led an upright life, for
he is not and was never a criminal. It is the state that is criminal in its
attempt to regulate individual use of certain toxic substances to the
arbitrary exclusion of others like cigarettes, or alcohol, for instance.

The right to use a noxious substance if one so chooses, or to transact
peacefully with other consenting adults who wish to procure these
substances, should be a civil liberty devoid of the threat of violent
search and seizure activity.

Practically unaltered since the 1960s, this wicked war on drugs, whose
warriors are now trolling for Richardson, saw the arrest of 682,885
Americans for marijuana in 1998 -- 88% of them for possession alone.

The law may be an ass in Richardson's case, but its interpretation needn't
continue to be so asinine.

This case should invoke the values of compassion, as well as the tenet of
rehabilitation. The former was woefully lacking over the airwaves.

I hope the sample of mean spirits, which inundated talk shows, was
unrepresentative of the population at large.

The same callers who howled for Richardson's blood, heaped praise on a
Washington state teen, nay viper, who ratted on her parents for growing
some weed in their basement.

These parents were prosperous professionals whose downfall was to raise a
child -- no doubt progressively -- with no concept of loyalty and a sense
of proportion.

As for rehabilitation, I recoil from having to speak of it in the case of
Mr. Richardson, who isn't the least a criminal, but has been cast as one;
just as I recoil at the sight of Mr. Richardson and his wife made to grovel
before the state and its machinery.