DRUG PROHIBITION CREATES MANY PROBLEMS

Dear Editor:

Re Illegal drug manufacturing affects everyone, Jul. 14, p. 4 Didsbury Review.

I have a few questions for Dan Singleton about his evident support
for drug prohibition, a program he should know was initiated during
the first half of the 20th century as a means of persecuting and
"controlling" people who imported marijuana and opium.

1. If drugs are banned because they are harmful to users, why, then,
are tobacco and alcohol not banned? Doesn't this seem unfair to those
who prefer illegal drugs? If we ban one harmful drug, shouldn't we
ban all harmful drugs?

2. Is it not true that, far from protecting users from harm, banning
a drug harms them much more than would otherwise be the case because
it cuts them off from access to drugs of known potency and purity?
Weren't thousands of Americans poisoned or blinded by adulterated
alcohol during Prohibition. Didn't the problems vanish when alcohol
was legalized again?

3. Doesn't drug prohibition cause street level drug dealing? Why
would anyone buy drugs in the street if the corner store sells them?

4. Is it not true that if drugs were legalized, the flow of funds to
terrorist groups would dry up? How much money does Osama bin Laden
make from booze and tobacco?

5. The 1973 Le Dain Commission concluded, "There appears to be little
permanent physiological damage from chronic use of pure opiate
narcotics." Why, then, ban heroin?

6. If prohibition is so great, why did America give up on the
prohibition of alcohol?

7. Is it not true that if drugs and prostitution were legalized, the
power of the Hells Angels would be severely curtailed? After all,
Prohibition created Al Capone, not the other way around.

8. Is it not true that if marijuana were legalized, marijuana grow
operations would be no more dangerous, do no more damage and steal no
more hydro than the average tomato grow operation?

Rather than protecting anyone, drug laws serve to provide highly
useful, functional and beneficial scapegoats.

They provide a ruling class with fig leaves to place over the
unsightly social ills that are endemic to the social system over
which they preside and they give the general public a focus for blame
in which a chemical 'bogeyman', or the 'deviants' who ingest it, are
the root cause for a wide array of complex social problems.

Alan Randell

Victoria, B.C.