PROHIBITION DOES NOT WORK

The B.C. marijuana crop alone is worth at least $6 billion annually.
The global illegal drug trade is worth over $400 billion, with that
value caused by the products being on the black market. The
Canada-wide war on drugs currently costs about $6 billion annually ,
and has achieved nothing except to make things a million times worse
by maintaining those black market prices. And now Canada is doing it
again with tobacco. Police budgets go up; new prisons have to be
built; more courtrooms and lawyers and judges; psychiatric hospitals;
"harm reduction" programs; the list is endless and grows
exponentially. It is going to cost taxpayers at least 10 times as
much to fight illegal smokes as we'll get in tax revenue. Prohibition
does not work. And to think all this is because of junk science lies
about second-hand tobacco smoke, so that big pharmaceutical companies
can make billions from their own brands of nicotine-cessation
products. It's all madness.

Steve Hartwell

(Prohibition is particularly dumb in the current economy.)