POT POLICY SHOULD GO UP IN SMOKE

Kathy Bauder's piece in Friday'sWhig ("It's time we stopped allowing
pushers and drugs to destroy families") was one of the most
enlightening and moving newspaper columns I have read in the past
decade. Of course, the use of drugs is a familiar issue, because drug
pushers and drug addicts occupy a kind of hidden ghetto in almost
every Canadian community. The well-publicized Vancouver East Side
centre of addiction exist, in varying degrees, in almost every
community in Canada. But Kathy's column offers something different --
almost Shakespearian in its capacity to generate, at the same time,
both an intellectual and an emotional response.

For example:

"An addiction to alcohol or drugs is like an alien taking over and
consuming one's mind. Addiction has no conscience and is very
selfish; it does not care if the person it is consuming is a mother,
father, son, daughter. All it wants is to feed itself and destroy as
many people as it can."

"Drugs are killing our children. We are allowing them to destroy our
families. We need to see that the addict has been abducted by the
power of the addiction. We need to force our governments to build
treatment facilities and transition houses, instead of super jails.
We need to band together as a society and destroy the power addiction
has over our loved ones.

Now a personal perspective. I am the father of six children. Every
one of them smoked "pot". They also, in their teens, drank more than
I approved of. But they were young adults, and as I learned,
teenagers reach a time when they must make their own decisions. But
when Kathy is writing about drugs, I don't think she is writing about
marijuana. There is an oft repeated story in my family, of the night
a son at age 16 came home at 11 p. m. -- and 10 minutes later was on
his way out again. I said: "Dave, it's too late; you're not going out
again tonight." He looked me squarely in the eyes and said: "Yes, I
am." I was silent for a moment, while he stood with his hand on the
door-knob. Then I had an epiphany. I said: "Well, Dave, I guess you
are. You're a man now. So all I can say is try to remember to act like a man."

I have my own perspective on drugs (and drug laws). In the United
States, in 1919, a constitutional amendment was passed that
prohibited the sale of almost all alcoholic beverages. This amendment
was repealed in 1933. (After signing the amendment, President
Roosevelt was quoted as saying, "I think this would be a good time
for a beer.")

There were some positive consequences from Prohibition. It provided a
treasure trove for novelists. For example Loren Estleman's Whiskey
Riverwas written in 1931 when the end of Prohibition was fast
approaching. The novel describes Detroit as a killing field where
members of warring gangs slaughter one another over millions of
dollars worth of liquor, smuggled to the United States over the
Canadian border.

The prohibition of the sale of marijuana, in both Canada and the U.
S., has fostered the same gang-driven illegal market that defined the
Prohibition era. But in its social consequences, our pot-prohibition
laws are far worse. A teenager buying pot in the black market is soon
dealing with a guy who will offer him a "bonus" sample of cocaine,
heroin, etc. These mind-mutilating drugs -- not pot -- are the drugs
that destroy families. How long will it take us to learn the lessons
of Prohibition? And how many families will pay the price of our
stupid, irrational drug policies, before we finally realize that the
cure is worse than the disease?

Paul M. Roddick
Kingston