THE NEXT TIME YOU GET ALL MORALLY OUTRAGED ABOUT DRUGS AND GANGS AND VIOLENCE ... THINK ABOUT WHAT WENT UP YOUR NOSE SATURDAY NIGHT

His words can't come out any clearer, even if we don't like where the
finger points.

"I think a lot of guys and gals sitting on the tenth and fifteenth
floor of the office towers snorting cocaine don't see how they're
affecting the violence on our streets, they think they're immune to
it all," says Fred Lindsay, the province's top cop, who believes it's
now time for this city and this province to do some holding up of the
mirror and some connecting of the dots.

"I don't know what's going on in our society? Why do they go after
this kind of high? I've sat in front of the odd beer bottle but it's
not destructive like this.

"They have money to spread around and somehow they think this is one
way they'll entertain themselves. It's part of the decay of our
society we've got to turn around and clean up."

What? The gays and gals in the tall towers? Decay in society? When
did we start talking about so-called respectable people being an issue?

But Fred and this columnist do speak of the guy with the great job,
the fat wallet, the best toys, the social status and the high-end
drug habit who sees nothing, less than nothing, between him and what
garbage is now happening in this city.

"He's not pulling the trigger but he's just as guilty as the guy on
the street running the drug operation," says this province's
solicitor general, who is from up around Stony Plain, near Edmonton.

"Then there are people putting on parties in middle and upper-class
neighbourhoods where the choice is not necessarily the best scotch,
it's a line of cocaine.

"I don't think they recognize they're a big part of the problem. They
think they're above it. But the root cause of all organized crime and
gang violence is the sale of illicit drugs. If the users aren't
there, the gangs aren't there."

Yes, it's the date on the calendar to take responsibility in a
province where if you've got the easy-come, easy-go boomtown bucks
you can buy pretty well anything you want, including, if the stats
are right, plenty of drugs.

And, as gangster shoots gangster, or an innocent soul who happens to
be in the wrong place at the wrong time, you can preach law and order
and curse the scum of the city, all the while enjoying cocaine with
others who have the same easy access to the not-so-finer things in life.

Fred's comments will rub some people the wrong way, even though this
city's police chief recently referred to the big appetite for drugs
in Calgary and it just isn't possible all the street crackheads are
inhaling anywhere near all the consumption going on in this town.

Yes, some individuals sure won't be happy because now the hot light
of public attention shifts, at least for a moment, to you or someone
in your family or someone you know or someone at work or someone
you've hung out with or partied alongside or someone you've seen at a
bar or get-together.

It is not a nice, neat phoney baloney morality tale where it is Them,
the dirty, grimy, greasy goofballs and Us, the proper folk who go to
work and pay taxes and keep our rattling bones safely stored and our
hypocrisy intact.

By the way, because the people we're talking about get their drugs at
a distance, it's not their neighbourhood they're putting in the
toilet. Birds and birdbrains alike know enough not to poop in their
own nests. Let somebody else play victim to those who work the
streets. And, just to make matters really crazy, those victimized
neighbourhoods are then looked down on by the well-heeled cocaine customers.

Fred is soon rolling out an investigative sheriff unit ready to shut
down crack houses and properties used for prostitution. He also wants
the province's crime-fighting battle plan to look at ways to help
drug users get off the stuff or better enforce existing laws.

"We'll jump on it. Part of it is education and trying to get more
help to people who are addicted. But what they are doing promotes
what's going on in the streets. They're conducting illegal
activities. And police can investigate that."

Kent Hehr, the colourful Liberal MLA from Calgary Buffalo, who lives
in comfy digs in what's left of the comfy part of downtown, observes
those people with more money than brains. "They live in my condo
building," says Kent, who speaks truth to power or truth to idiots or
truth to both, as often is the case.

"There's a glamourous crowd, living fast, making the good money,
spending the big dollars to be in whatever in-crowd they want to be
in. They're equally to blame as people using on the streets. No
matter who is buying the drugs it leads to one thing. Gangs."