CULPABILITY AND THE DRUG CONSUMER

A little over a week ago, the Huronia Combined Forces Drug Unit
seized more than $163,000 in cocaine from an apartment on Colborne
Street in Orillia -- the biggest haul in memory in this region.

At about the same time, the worst single massacre was unfolding in
southwestern Ontario. What now appears to be a biker gang purge left
eight people dead, stuffed into abandoned vehicles in a farmer's field.

As far as we know, there is no connection between the Orillia cocaine
bust and the murders. But these two events serve as images of a
sinister underworld.

Keep them in mind.

Because this editorial is directed not at the criminals who deal in
drugs and death, but the people who keep them in business.

It would be wrong to suggest their customers are likewise members of
the underworld, haunting "the streets."

The reality is that many drug users are more or less ordinary people.

University and college kids.

High school kids.

Sometimes elementary school kids, shocking as that may seem.

Some of them are business people.

Even doctors and lawyers and journalists and teachers and cops and
electricians and plumbers are not immune to 'recreational' drug use.

The point is, ordinary people -- from youths to senior citizens --
buy illegal drugs, from mild pot to the hardest crack.

Some are obliterated by addiction. Some slowly destroy their lives.
But most go on with ordinary lives, raising kids, earning a living,
paying off the mortgage and banking RSPs.

And those ordinary people do not, in most cases, see their connection
to people who execute other people in lonely fields.

But there is a connection.

The drug economy, brutal as it is, functions much like the legitimate
economy, obeying laws of supply and demand.

It is made possible, driven in fact, by the consumer.

So with all due respect, we ask you to consider the implications, the
connections, the blood, the death, the misery, the corruption, the
violence, the naked evil wrapped up in that little diversion you seek
now and again.

Sorry about the sermon.

It just all seems so unnecessary.