TIME TO TAKE CONTROL OF DRUG TRADE

Editor, The News:

This is regarding Mark Rushton's column "Deterrence, it seems, is a
lost word" (The News, July 11).

The belief that criminal justice interventions can deter the violence
associated with the trade in currently illegal drugs could not be
more misguided.

It is akin to believing that dousing a fire with gasoline will help
extinguish it.

For most of the 20th century, bellicose U.S. ideology has ensured
enforcement is the only option for addressing the human proclivity to
alter consciousness with psychoactive substances.

The result: increased drug use (especially among youth), increased
availability (high schools are primary retail outlets for illegal
drugs) and increased associated violence.

In the U.S., the so-called "land of the free," the drug war has been
egregiously racist and resulted in the largest per capita prison
population in the world.

Asserting that "legalizing" won't help is a specious scare tactic.

Government control of alcohol production and distribution was put in
place in most Canadian provinces in the 1920s, a decade before it
happened in the United States, and the sky did not fall.

Escalating the drug war in order to stop it is pure folly.

It is time to end the violence and for Canada to model sane policies
for our southern neighbour.

This will only happen by taking a public-health - rather than
criminal justice - approach to drug use: taxation, regulation and control.

Kenneth Tupper

Vancouver