BERTON RIGHT ON WRONG PRIORITIES

Re: your profile of Pierre Berton (Gazette, Oct. 30, "At 84, he's still a
star").

The article quotes Berton as saying: "We're putting more money into
searching out marijuana users than we are into searching out child
molesters."

He couldn't be more right. It is absolutely criminal how much money we
waste on a failed policy such as prohibition, when we could be
spending it instead on day care, health care, affordable housing, the
military and so on.

With prohibition, the growers, dealers and cops win. The dealers and
growers love prohibition because it makes easy-to-grow weed worth its
weight in gold. The police like prohibition because they like the
power, but mostly they love the overtime. Police have a huge budgetary
interest in keeping prohibition alive.

The ones who lose out are the harmless pot users and the taxpayers who
are footing the awesome bill to support prohibition. If prohibition
were going to work, it would have worked by now.

Russell Barth

Ottawa