WANT THE PUBLIC'S TRUST AND HELP? STOP LYING TO US

Politicians are routinely asinine and stupid. And the fact that
they're aware they're behaving as such -- because they're pandering
quite deliberately to a base few-- always makes it tough to swallow.

It takes a mighty fine stew of stupidity to top the norm.

Introducing Justice Minister Alison Redford, an adult smart enough to
know better.

Unfortunately, Alberta's top law enforcement official evidently holds
the public in contempt, since she feels the best way to dissuade
people from using drugs is to lie to them and to scare them.

Given that she has a larger mandate that requires budget
appropriations, and that the futile drug war feeds that, perhaps her
diatribe earlier this week in Calgary shouldn't surprise anyone. But
I thought better of Redford.

Personal judgments aside, let's go over her positions and compare
them what non-partisan experts say:

Redford: "Gangs are in the business of making money and the way they
do that is by selling illegal drugs. Customers feed the machine of
crime, violence and gangs."

Reality: Gangs feed a demand from the public that will never end,
because most people who use drugs don't get hooked. If drugs were
legalized, controlled for purity and taxed, they would hold no
inherent black market value.

Redford: "It doesn't matter if the customer is someone who is
vulnerable or someone sitting in a middle-class neighbourhood or
someone with a lot of money, a customer is a customer. They're giving
money to gangs."

Reality: No, government fuels gangs by maintaining a black market for
drugs. One ounce of opium poppies cost 70 cents to produce, but can
generate $10,000 worth of opium. The disparity is caused by the
illegality, not the user.

Redford: "It's not as if some drugs are less dangerous than others."

Reality: Does this even require rebuttal? Only an uninformed idiot
would think that marijuana, a plant generally containing 8-13% THC --
a relatively benign compound when not ingested via combustion -- is
as dangerous as crack or as meth, or as heroin. The only truth here
is that they should all be decriminalized, so that the minority of
users who are addicted can be treated, instead of jailed.

Redford: "We know from the way gangs do business, a kilo of marijuana
from Canada is equivalent in the drug trade to a kilo of cocaine from
Colombia. It's important not to think some drugs are innocent and
aren't dangerous and don't contribute to the gang problem in the same
way. They all do. Equally."

Reality: Preposterous. The RCMP claimed this initially about a decade
ago and has never produced a single conviction or shred of evidence
that supports it. I challenge Redford to back the claim up.

Redford: "The assumption is perhaps some of these people, if they are
doing drugs, they can 'handle it.' They can 'afford it.' But, at the
end of the day, it all leads to the same decline."

Reality: A bald-faced lie. In fact, as the bi-partisan Senate report
into marijuana in 2002 made clear through statistics from around the
globe, less than four percent of users ever become addicted to hard
drugs. Marijuana is mildly addicting at best, although up to 10% of
regular smokers become "chronic users."

Redford: "This isn't about an individual making a personal choice
that doesn't impact anybody except them," she says. "When they buy
drugs, they are giving money to organizations trying to get more turf
and customer share and these people have guns and armoured vehicles
and they are prepared to kill."

Reality: They're prepared to kill because of money and profit. That
profit only exists because the product is illegal and has black
market value. If it weren't illegal it WOULD just be a matter of
personal choice for the vast majority.

Redford: "When I was young we used to talk an awful lot more about
how drugs were bad, how they got you addicted and, when you got
addicted, you committed crimes and, when you committed crimes, you
didn't have a lot of good choices to make in your life. We need to
talk about that again."

Reality: Actually, lying or grossly overgeneralizing to earlier
generation is WHY conservatives are losing the battle against drug
use. If Redford spent five minutes talking about the ties between pot
smoking and health consequences, she might get somewhere with young people.

Redford: "The public discussion is if we just legalized marijuana we
wouldn't have the problem. As I've said, in the drug trade, marijuana
is equal to cocaine."

Reality: What would the illegal profit potential of a product have to
do with its potential harm to users? Owning a blood diamond is wrong.
But it doesn't entail a trip to rehab.

Redford: "The problem is gangs will make the money selling the
illegal items, whatever they might be, unless nothing is illegal."

Reality: The only things gangs sell are either vice-related or
stolen. Yes, if you take away the vice issues, regulate them and
control them, gangs will still be out there stealing. But thank
goodness we'd now have enough cops freed up to actually deal with
that, because they're not running around arresting peaceful potheads
and the people who supply them.