CANNABIS SPRING

Spring has sprung, the grass is riz; Cannabis that is.

Chalk River has now joined the modern trend toward home grown marijuana
operations across Canada. Probably Deep River, Petawawa and Pembroke have
as well. Time will tell as our law enforcement minions continue to try to
bust the bad guys.

What is really curious about all this is that all the hype is directed at
what amounts to a collection of small business entrepreneurs. Yes they are
illegal entrepreneurs, but just your average small business types none the
less.

Why are they out there? Not difficult to answer that one. They exist
because there is a huge and profitable market for the product. For every
pusher there are hundreds of customers. Otherwise they would soon be out of
business.

There is considerable expense involved to say nothing of the risk of
getting caught in even a small grow operation and no one does this without
a very good probability of large profits.

So do we tramp down hard on the customers? No, no, no. The customer in our
society is just a poor victim of the evil pusher. What he or she gets is
help from the taxpayer to live with their self-inflicted addiction.

No more criminal prosecution for the person that creates the market for the
stuff. If they get on to hard drugs we give them free needles so they won't
catch horrible diseases from using dirty ones.

Where there is a market, there will always be people who will exploit it
regardless of the legality or the risk. That is the way the human race is.

The United States a few years ago proved beyond any reasonable doubt that
trying to eliminate alcohol by controlling the producers and pushers was a
monumental failure. For those too young to remember, they termed it
"Prohibition" and it created a massive criminal organization because the
customers were willing to pay any amount of money to feed their addiction.

Alcohol is still the favorite soporific of most of the population. It
causes a lot of problems for people who cannot control their own
consumption of it but by and large we have learned to live with it.

So there it is. The real villains in all of this are the customers, and
they are unfortunately too numerous and too amorphous to even recognize,
let alone control.

It seems to be a widespread human attribute that a large percentage of us
do not like our own brains; are not happy with the bodies and personalities
we were born with and now have to live with.

Too many of us will take any means of escaping from ourselves, regardless
of the expense or the risk to body and soul, and drugs are the current
first choice.

Back in 1932 Aldous Huxley, in his book "Brave New World," fantasized about
a drug called soma, probably based on an ancient East Indian drink of
immortality used in Vedic rituals, that had "all the advantages of
Christianity and alcohol with none of their defects."

Fifty years earlier PT Barnum was more realistic with his claim that a
sucker is born every minute.

The war on drugs is more than a war on criminals. It is a crusade to save
the human race from its own self-indulgence, and that is a tough proposition.

HAR

Editorials in the North Renfrew Times are written by members of the paper's
community-based Editorial Board. Current members of the board are: Allan
Katz - chair, Hilary Angell, John Hulbert, Harshy Patel, Al Rose, Lianne
Shea and editor-in-chief Terry Myers.