TOUGHEN LAWS, DON'T LEGALIZE

Re: Time to look at legalizing drugs by Keith Baldrey, TIMES Opinion, Nov.
13

Today, two events occurred that prompted me to write this letter. The
first event was attending the funeral of a twenty-one-year-old local
man who ended his own life due to drugs. The second was reading this
article, which appalled me not only for its content, but also by the
timing of its appearance.

The funeral was attended by at least a thousand people, which speaks
volumes as to this young man's worth and value to society. He had an
entire life to look forward to and yet drugs snatched away a son, a
brother, and his future. Drugs are stealing our children, stealing
their futures and robbing the joy from families. How can anyone
advocate that we legalize this menace to our future and the future of
our children?

The police cannot point to huge success stories in their relentless
ongoing clash, because the politicians and courts are far too lenient
with these criminals and are tying the hands of the police.

In this country, you get a much harsher punishment for poaching a few
salmon than you do for selling drugs. Yes, we do need a radical new
attitude to enforcement of drug crimes, but it is not to make it legal
to traffic drugs but to make it unpopular and costly.

To cite that drugs should be legal, as are alcohol and tobacco, and
then quote how crime decreased after Prohibition was repealed is doing
nothing but kidding ourselves.

Sure, those criminals stopped making money from booze, but organized
crime just changed to something else for its profits. Homes are broken
from alcohol and our health care system is overburdened with
tobacco-related illness. Just because it's legal doesn't make it right
and free. My wife is a nurse working in the neo-natal unit and it
breaks ours heart when we see drug-addicted mothers coming in and
having babies, born going through withdrawal and then being
apprehended and being placed in the system.

Some of these mothers for the third or fourth time. Should we make it
legal and then not only pay for the drugs for them but pay to keep
their children because they are inconvenient or unwanted?

Children are a gift, not an inconvenience to get in the way of drug
use. Make no mistake, we pay and pay dearly for this attitude of
tolerance to this wicked and insidious menace.

Alcohol is not exempt from this problem. What about all the babies
born with fetal alcohol syndrome and the costs they present to society?

We need to be both tolerant and intolerant of the drug problems we
face today.

Yes, we need to be tolerant of the addicts and help them, with
compassion, to get clean by funding detox and rehab centers, not by
providing drugs free or otherwise.

We, however, need to be intolerant of traffickers and toughen the laws
and enforce them to the maximum to make the price for trading in drugs
so steep that it is just not worth it to get involved. Build more
jails if needed, deport them if they are immigrants, send them up to
the Arctic to work camps for their sentences, let them develop the
north and provide a useful service for their sentence.

Think about the countries where drug dealing is a capital offence.
It's time to get serious with these parasites on society.

Make Canada a place where drug dealers do not want to
be.

The timing of this article is upsetting not only because of the
funeral, but also because the front page of that issue has the stories
of Remembrance Day. What must those veterans think knowing that they
fought and died for our freedom only to have us want to turn it over
to drugs?

Shame on us if we don't all stand up and be counted for the sake of
our children, our fathers and our future.

Tom Crowston,

a Maple Ridge resident