TINFOIL HAT DELUSION

When your neighbour's crazy, you don't buy him tinfoil so he can make
himself a new hat to prevent alien thought-control rays from
penetrating his skull.

Extraditing the self-styled "Prince of Pot," Marc Emery to the U.S.
for selling marijuana seeds south of the border via the mail is like
buying the Americans tinfoil.

Our justice system has signed off on it and it looks as though he's
going to do five years in U.S. federal lockup.

And that's wrong, even though I'm no fan of Marc Emery

He is not a crusader for freedom.

He's a crusader for making boatloads of money selling the dope
lifestyle and seeds to grow good dope.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It's just the caped-crusader delusions that bother
me.

And rarely will you find such sanctimony of hype generated by
anybody.

I mean, this guy makes Mariah Carrey look humble.

However, as a society, we can't run around extraditing people to
foreign lands simply because they're jerks.

While I understand the need to honour our treaties with foreign
powers, and that it's important that neither Canada nor the U.S.
become safe havens for those fleeing justice ... America's war on
drugs is a tinfoil hat delusion if ever there was one.

Unfortunately, Canada has been in lockstep with puritanical nanny
state clowns south of the 49th since the get-go.

When my great-grandma was young, she could walk into a pharmacy and
buy cocaine, opium and morphine over the counter, without a
prescription.

And drug use was declining.

So it was time to make them illegal.

The U.S. went first, in 1913 and we followed a year later just in time
for the First World War ... and if ever there was a time in human
history when a hit or two of recreational opium was justified, it was
during the First World War.

The drug war has always been about thinly veiled racism and the need
to keep the drug du jour of ethnic communities away from the children
of white folks.

Opium was made illegal because of the racist caricature of the
sinister Oriental puffing away in his opium den and plotting to turn
freshly addicted white women into prostitutes.

Back in the 1930s, cops - in their historic, ever-escalating need for
bigger toys - got their .32-calibre pistols in the U.S. upgraded to
the heavier-hitting .38 because of the fear that marijuana-crazed
black men on a rampage wouldn't go down if you shot them with the
smaller round - as profound a misstatement about the psychological
effects of marijuana as you can make.

The hysteria that accompanied the crack epidemic was more of the same
combination of drug prohibitionists seeking a way to pump up their
budgets combined with more whispered racism.

Accompanying prohibition is the steady rise in production and
consumption.

The illegal drug market comprises nearly 10% of global trade;
marijuana cultivation alone is B.C.'s most lucrative agricultural commodity.

The minute you quit thinking in so-called moral terms and start
thinking in economic terms, there is only one rational conclusion to
be made: Anti-drug laws are merely price supports for illegal drug
dealers.

It's like the biggest and most destructive farm subsidy ever
enacted.

Drug money funds organized crime and, not incidentally, the Taliban
insurgency.

Fighting over drug money has seen more people die on the Mexican
border in the past five years than got killed in Iraq.

Mexico is a hair away from becoming a failed state because Americans
and Canadians like to get high.

Because drug dealers can't rely on normal social mechanisms to
adjudicate disputes, they shoot each other, from the streets of
Calgary all the way to the Pakistan/Afghanistan border.

The costs of the drug war are an obscene waste, and most of the deaths
that occur from drug use are a direct result of the trade's illegality.

It's time to stop playing this game now.

We should legalize marijuana and tax the hell out of it, but still
undercut what the black market offers, and run these thugs out of business.

And, despite the fact that he's kind of creepy, we should hang onto
Marc Emery.