OPINIONS ON DRUGS ROOTED IN FEAR

In her letter decrying the evils of drug-law abolition, ("A crime is a
crime," May 22), Louise Fribance brings up some of the central
arguments made by both sides of the issue at stake, but she does not
address even a single one of them by exposing, acknowledging or
dealing with any of the facts.

Fribance writes: "How many people, compared to smokers and drinkers,
use marijuana and other drugs? A few, comparatively."

Really? More than one-third of all Canadians over the age of 16 have
used cannabis at least once.

That's almost as many Canadians as are currently addicted (to some
extent at least) to tobbacco, although thanks to anti-smoking
education campaigns, we can probably expect the adult tobacco
addiction rate to be under one-quarter within the next 10 years.

There is no such prediction possible concerning cannabis use, partly
because cannabis isn't physically addictive at all and partly because
no science-based education exists around cannabis use, because it's
more or less illegal even to do the research necessary to find the
whole truth about this substance.

Fribance also says, "Think how many more students would use marijuana
and hard drugs if they were legal and available."

The hard facts are available from the past 20-plus years' experience
in the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, the U.K., and most recently
and successfully in Spain.

I won't bother to address the remaining points Ms. Fribance has
brought up - most of you reading this have access to the Internet, and
you can research it all for yourself.

Ms. Fribance's rantings are too rooted in fear - and far too
insufficiently rooted in reality - to be worth refuting here with
thousands of redundancies, but every single reader who cares can find
the truth about cannabis in less than five minutes, can learn almost
the entirety of it in less than an hour, and will understand the
enormity of the injustice being perpetrated here (and the combined
ignorance and malice that make it possible).

Michael Muirhead

Vancouver