DECRIMINALIZATION IS SIMPLISTIC

Beware of those who would have you believe that decriminalization is
the only way to solve our drug epidemics and related criminal activity.

It is a simplistic solution that will remove the stigmatism from
addiction and put our youth at incalculable risk.

And I believe it will open the floodgates to antisocial
behavior.

In 1997, English prison doctor and renowned author Anthony Daniels,
pen name Theodore Dalrymple, published an essay entitled Don't
Legalize Drugs.

The essay began: "There is a progression in the minds of men: first
the unthinkable, and then it becomes an orthodoxy whose truth seems so
obvious that no one remembers that anyone ever thought differently.
This is just what is happening with the idea of legalizing drugs: it
has reached the stage when millions of thinking men are agreed that
allowing people to take whatever they like is the obvious, indeed the
only, solution to the social problems that arise from the consumption
of drugs."

In Canada, our post-1960s permissive approach to the use of
mind-altering substances by a minority of citizens, particularly
teenagers and young adults, resulted in increasingly ferocious drug
epidemics: heroin then cocaine, followed by crack cocaine and finally
crystal methamphetamine.

In lockstep, the criminal justice system, corrections and parole
became a collective tattered and toothless scarecrow.

And through it all our politicians and judges provided only token
resistance.

Today, to the great delight of scofflaws - we have too many
criminologists, judges, talk-show hosts, columnists and editors
raising the white flag of legalization -they loudly proclaim that we
have lost the war on drugs and that prohibition itself is the cause of
drug abuse and related criminality.

On the philosophical aspect of legalization of drugs Daniels observed
that: "Drug taking is a lazy man's way of pursuing happiness and
wisdom, and the shortcut turns out to be the deadest of dead ends. We
lose remarkably little by not being permitted to take drugs."

No culture that makes publicly sanctioned self-indulgence its highest
good can long survive. A radical egotism is bound to ensue in which
any limitations upon personal behavior are experienced as
infringements of basic rights. Distinctions between the important and
the trivial, between the freedom to criticize received ideas and the
freedom to take LSD, are precisely the standards that keep societies
from barbarism.

Legalizers avoid moral and philosophical considerations and go
straight to the pragmatic. They fall into two self-serving camps:
freewill advocates who say cannabis is harmless and beneficial; and
myopic medical-men who would solve opiate addiction and property crime
with free prescriptive heroin.

Cannabis legalizers want you to believe the hallucinatory effect of
marijuana is just good fun even though recent studies in New Zealand
and Holland express concern that regular use of cannabis brings an
increased risk of mental problems and psychotic symptoms. In their
raucous demands for legalization of pot, I cannot detect one wisp of
concern over its effect on children.

Opiate legalizers expect you to believe that open-ended
tranquilization by prescriptive heroin is without risk. They propose
de facto legalization for junkies knowing that heroin is cruelly
denied to patients in terminal pain.

Neither camp will discuss the continuing destructive epidemic of crack
cocaine and emerging catastrophe of crystal methamphetamine, party
drugs and steroids.

Nor will they come to grips with the reality that we are enmeshed
culturally and economically with the Americans. We are not an island
nation.

International drug lords will ignore Canadian legalization of drugs
and continue targeting their North American cash cow.

It is plain stupid to say that Canada has waged and lost a war against
drugs.

All we have done is engaged in a spiritless retreat in a war being
waged against North America by international drug cartels. Always on
the defensive, we continue to put too few police and customs officers
in the field to stem the onslaught.

During the past 20 years the drug war against North America has been
intensified by a growing number of rogue Canadians - scofflaw citizens
who insolently mock authority and law-abiding Canadians as they
produce and sell marijuana and crystal methamphetamine.

With too few police officers, too many plea-bargaining Crown
prosecutors, too many lenient judges and an anemic
corrections-parole-immigration system, how can anyone make the claim
that Canada has enforced prohibition against possession and
trafficking in drugs?

Only cold-blooded pragmatists or deluded ideologues would have us
endure sanitized junkies and potheads while paranoid and unpredictable
crack-heads and meth-heads continue on the rampage.

You have an unusual electoral opportunity in the coming months. On May
17 there will be a provincial election (as well as a referendum on the
electoral system itself) and next November local government elections
are to be held.

With a minority government in Ottawa, a federal election could occur
at any time.

I urge you to actively participate in each election.

Become well informed on various issues including criminal justice,
education and health care.

Try to find time to attend a few all-candidate meetings.

What you say to the politicians will have more impact than opinions of
sundry editors, columnists and talk-show hosts.