JUNKIES HAVE TO PAY THAT MUCH BECAUSE DRUGS ARE ILLEGAL

I'm responding to Matthew Ramsey's article in Friday's Province about
drug use in Vancouver.

The two naive Simon Fraser University students who've "discovered"
that drug addicts have to raise huge sums of money every day are
missing the point -- and $100 a day seems awfully low, too.

They fail to ask why narcotics, at a production cost of pennies a
dose, are so expensive.

The answer: Because they're illegal.

No amount of additional police, prisons and rehabilitation centres
will change this basic economic fact.

Drug-related crime is our society's self-inflicted wound. If drugs
were legal (and therefore cheap and safe), addicts wouldn't have to
rob and scam every day, and would only be hurting themselves. That's
what you call "harm reduction."

But it will only come when we end our stupid, disastrous experiment in
drug prohibition.

Lyle Neff,

Vancouver