DRUG BILL DESIGNED TO INCREASE CRIME

To the editor,

Re: Government needs to take modern approach to drug laws (Letter to
the editor, Dec. 30)

Bill C-15 is designed specifically to increase crime. It is designed
to manufacture more criminals so that the new multi-billion dollar
for-profit prison industry.

Also, by scaring off the small time pot growers with threats of
mandatory jail time, the government is handing more of the business
to the gangsters who are not afraid of anything. This will result in
more wealth for them, which means more violent competition. Future
governments will use this inevitable increase in crime to justify the
increased budgets and powers of police, the building of a dozen more
jails, and the further erosion of our collective civil rights and
liberties. It also helps them pander to their myopic and misinformed
voter base, and paints anyone sensible as soft on crime.

As for legalizing things like meth, coke, x, and heroin, we must
consider that junk food kills many times more Canadians each year
than all illegal drugs combined, and that marijuana is yet to kill a
single person. These hard drugs are already statistically safer than
either alcohol or tobacco, yet these two poisons are regulated and taxed.

Regulating drugs would do far more to reduce the problems currently
associated with them. If all of these drugs were made by professional
labs and sold in pharmacies, they would be a lot safer:
dose-regulated, age-restricted, and quality-controlled. Further, the
street dealers would have no customers.

Of course, legalizing and regulating marijuana alone would save us
about a billion dollars a year, generate an additional $3 billion in
annual tax revenue, free up police resources, and drastically reduce
the demand for hard drugs. That is $4 billion a year for things that
actually reduce drug use, like treatment, education, health-care, job
creation, and social programs.

But prohibitionists refuse to admit to facts, science, history, or
common sense. Like religious zealots, the more proof you give them,
the more they dig in their heels and insist that only more
prohibition can save us from the problems caused by prohibition.
Their plan is to spend billions, to jail tens of thousands, in the
meager hope of terrifying millions into obeying their absurd,
gangster-subsidizing laws.

Prohibitionists are not merely demented, they are diabolically evil.

Russell Barth, Nepean, Ont. Federally licensed medical marijuana user