DRUG PROBLEMS ARE A PERSONAL ISSUE

Dear Sir:

Absent from the forum on crystal meth (in Ste Anne last week) were
any scientific facts. For instance, guest speaker, former Drug Unit
member Dale Ridley, attributes "many deaths, destruction of families
and a lot of crime" to crack cocaine before predicting crystal meth
will be 10 times worse. In that statement moral agency is attributed
to an inert substance from the periodic table.

Canadians would scoff at the notion of police providing sex education
to the public, especially if they were to impart unsound science in
their presentation. Yet when the subject comes to drugs, the police
are presented as experts on everything from child rearing to the
pharmacological properties of chemicals.

The police are but experts on policing. Pharmacologists are the
proper authorities for drug education and anthropologists are the
proper authorities to explain the age-old use of ceremonial and
ritual substances. I am willing to debate any politician from any
party on any drug issue facing our community. I make no bones about
being a libertarian and that I expound the well-known views of Milton
Friedman and Dr. Thomas Szasz.

I should not have to debate the police. In fact, the police ought to
stick to policing and not take a political position at all. Reporting
crime as "drug-related" again attributes moral agency to inert
chemicals, "prohibition-related" crime would be more truthful but
then editors would be on the "wrong" side of the drug war.

Shall we have a little chat about teaching our children about peer
pressure? Children learn from seeing, we teach our children to resist
peer pressure but none of that resistance is demonstrated by school
teachers, our press, our police or our elected leaders.

I am fearful of the direction one-sided drug debate is taking. Who
wants to argue with the police? Well, I do. What started off as
parents being encouraged to denounce their drug-using children to
authorities in the '70s quickly evolved to children denouncing their
parents in the Just-Say-No moralizing campaign of former First Lady
Nancy Regan.

Unchecked, the notion is now evolving into encouraging strangers to
denounce strangers. Those are omnipotent state values. Community and
family values are different from state values. Anybody who grew up in
an East bloc country can tell you how quickly secret police can
destroy the trust a community must have.

Parent-child communications are always trumpeted though no one seems
to point out the reason. Parents are best at instilling moral values
that build the character in their children, to resist the temptation
of pleasure drugs. Therein lies the secret that everybody knows deep
down inside.

Drug problems are deeply personal and not state, medical or community
problems at all. There are deeper spiritual problems at play with
those seeking to destroy their own souls by whatever means.

The police are the worst soul doctors there are. Sure, every parent
would love to have a little cage to lock up their misbehaving teens.
It is a belief based in demonic possession that chemicals somehow
have power over moral actors. The idea is that if these demon
chemicals just leave the system somehow all will be well.

Works about as well as locking up the town drunk, but at least the
police are seen to be doing "something." Responsibility for one's own
drug intake can save us the expense and experience of a police state.

Chris Buors

Winnipeg, MB