GOVERNMENT LIES AND WASTES

Dear Editor,

I suppose I should cease to be shocked at this government's ability
both to lie and to waste money.

As I sit in my seat at the movie theatre to watch Inception - which I
highly recommend - I am bombarded with commercials.

That is to be expected. What I did not expect was to see an ad full of
blatant lies funded by my tax dollars.

I am talking, of course, about the government's "not4me" anti-drug
campaign. You may have seen the signs on SkyTrain advertisements or in
buses. It is yet another rehashing of the failed "Just say no"
campaign of the Ronald Reagan administration.

The ad shows a young child being passed a cannabis cigarette, then
cuts to him sitting in his room taking a pill of ecstasy, then his
subsequent depression.

In fact, there is a gateway effect. It is much easier for our children
to get hooked on hard drugs, because we mix hard and soft drugs
together in the black market. Portugal has proven it: they
decriminalized drugs and saw use of hard drugs drop
dramatically.

Prohibition increases addiction.

However, the ad implies that marijuana is a gateway drug, which is a
lie. Every scientific study done to find this "gateway drug" effect
has come back saying there is no such effect. The first study to say
it was done in the early 1940s.

In a time when government is telling us we are entering an "age of
austerity," they are spending millions on outdated propaganda. They
are lying, and using your tax dollars to do it.

Travis Erbacher,
Langley