Letter of the Day: Just Say Yes

(RE: "Pot debate sparks up," Oct 27)

Fred Burford just cracks me up when he states that "those promoting
marijuana’s industrial and medicinal usage are often those that wish to use
the drug recreationally." Any cannabis legalizer that I know couldn’t give
a hoot in Hades about obtaining society’s blessing to use the drug
recreationally. Recreational use is a canard to maintain the fiction that
drug legalizers have some sinister, ulterior motive. The issues run much
deeper than Burford’s glib assertion and include the fact that our current
prohibition is responsible for a number of wrongs including entrenched
organized crime, easy access to drugs by adolescents and reduced civil
liberties.

Burford further states that we have seen "what happens to kids who use
marijuana who are now in their thirties and forties with their lives
diverted." I have to admit that by the time I got around to digesting this
little nugget of narcofiction, I was practically incontinent. I would like
to know what all these thirty and fortyyear old cannabis users are being
diverted from. All the users that I know (in their twenties, thirties,
forties, fifties and beyond) are doing what anyone else in their age
bracket is doing, i.e. going to university, having relationships, raising
children, etc. I’m not talking about slugs here either these people are
welleducated professionals like doctors, lawyers, teachers, physicists and
smallbusiness entrepreneurs.

I would have an easier time believing in the aims of an organization like
the Council of Drug Abuse if they fought for the market regulation of
cannabis selling it through the LCBO or allowing private cultivation. We
will never be able to regulate the use of drugs through prohibition. If the
Federal government and CODA were serious about fighting organized crime and
limiting access to any illicit drug then they’d certainly opt for the
legalization of these substances. The status quo is a grave injustice to
all Canadians.

Carey Ker