DEALING WITH DRUGS

Police are fooling themselves if they think they have a chance of ever
winning the "War On Some Drugs". People grow pot, import cocaine, and
make ecstasy because it is lucrative, and it is lucrative specifically
because it is illegal. The way to steal money from "organized crime",
give police more powers of enforcement, reduce use, abuse, harm, and
death, is to regulate all these drugs and tax them. If we want to stop
this wave of "Al Capones" that are currently running the
multi-billion-dollar annual drug business, we need to issue licenses
and tax the people involved. It would not only make the police's job
easier, their success rate would be higher. As it is, they are only
catching about 10% of the drug activity. No one would go to a doctor
that was only successful 10% of the time.

By not legalizing and regulating drugs like tobacco and alcohol, our
government, courts, and police are knowingly and deliberately
subsidizing organized crime. They are making people paranoid about
their neighbors, making many dangerous drugs easier for teens to
access than alcohol and tobacco, wasting police time and resources,
wasting nearly $2 billion every year on a failed policy, and
endangering Canadians. They are also keeping billions more in
potential annual tax revenue away from Canadians and putting it
directly into the underground economy, instead of education and
healthcare. It leads me to wonder just which side of the law they are
really on.

Police have no chance of ever winning this war, and it is absurd to
keep trying. Prohibition didn't work in the 1920's with alcohol, and
it is now failing even more miserably with drugs. After eight decades,
if prohibition were going to work it would have worked by now.

Russell Barth

Ottawa