LEGALIZE DRUGS AND GANGS WILL GO AWAY

Editor:

Stephen Harper's visit to Vancouver on Thursday, Feb. 26 was highly
disturbing. Mr. Harper's Conservative party wants to re-introduce previously
expired legislation, which would increase the penalty for growing one
marijuana plant to a mandatory minimum sentence of six months in prison, as
well as increasing penalties for other drug offences.

The way that Mr.Harper has decided to do this, very opportunistically,
has been to slide it under reasonable legislation which would increase
gang-related murders to a first-degree murder charge. This is
dishonest politics. It is also guaranteed to fail.

When alcohol prohibition was in effect, many people died from impure
homemade alcohol, and innocent people were shot down in the streets
over territorial disputes. Does this sound familiar? That was nearly a
century ago.

Prohibition of any substance increases prices, reduces purity causing
accidental deaths, and increases the violence of gang rivalries, due
to higher sums of money being involved. Even with a century of data to
show that prohibition is a failed policy, Mr. Harper wants to move us
further in the wrong direction.

Want a real solution? Legalize all drugs. Put the gangs out of
business. Politicians who support prohibition are guaranteeing gangs
in B.C. increasingly high profit margins from drug sales, as well as a
monopoly on the drug trade. If there was no money in the drug trade,
there would be nothing to fight over, and there would be no more
innocent deaths.

Until that happens, the blood of innocents will be on all of our
hands. Hopefully, before it's too late, this fact will weigh heavily
on all of our minds, and finally, after a century of failed drug
policy and unnecessary deaths, we will do the right thing.

Travis Erbacher

Langley