VICES, SUCH AS DRUGS, ARE CRIMES WE DO TO OURSELVES

Sherwood Park News -- Letter writer Kathy Clow (March 31) to consider that
tolerance is one of the four cardinal virtues of St. Thomas Aquinas.

Prudence, justice and fortitude are the other three, and drug prohibition
does not live up to a single one.

Vainglory is wanting your way so bad that you would willingly harm another
to get achieve your goal.

Handing out criminal records for the vice of drug taking delivers the sinful
state.

Crime implies harm to another person or their property. Vices are harms we
do to ourselves. We ought to answer at the Pearly Gates for our vices, not
to the criminal justice system of Canada.

First of all, due to government legalized fictions, all non-medical drug use
is erroneously called abuse in the therapeutic state that we have built for
ourselves.

The doctors now occupy the pedestal of esteem that was formerly reserved for
the church and humanity has simply learned how to do our moralizing in
medical terms to get around separation of church and state. Drugs have been
medicalized for less than 100 years.

Before then, drug use was properly categorized as a spiritual ceremony and
the ritual and social custom of Eastern cultures. We ignore history at our
own peril.

Alcohol is still recognized as the social and ceremonial drug of
Western/Christian based society. It is wine in the priest's goblet and it is
wine we toast each other with at social occasions.

Education and toleration of other cultures is a virtue too. The "fit to
work" argument is at the base of the racist drug war. The work ethic of the
opium smoking Chinese was noted while they did the back-breaking work of
building this nations railroads. With the railroad complete, Chinese people
gathered in Vancouver and started businesses and were competing for jobs.
The whisky drinking hungover white Union member could not measure up and
after the 1907 race riot in Vancouver, the Opium Narcotic Act, Canada's
first drug law was passed in 1908. Thirty thousand Chinese were deported
under that act. The work habits of the coca leaf chewers of South America
are legendary too.

The Nolin Senate Committee devoted an entire chapter to the cannabis use and
driving issue. Cannabis users tend to slow down and adjust to conditions and
were found to be safer drivers than those high on life.

To drive home the point, it was revealed during the investigation into the
friendly fire deaths of Canadians that the U.S. Air Force insisted their
pilots use "go pills" before they take control of the most complicate
warbirds ever devised.

One last point to consider is that Kathy Clow believes the lies of the
therapeutic state because she relied on her government to inform her
opinion. That demonstrates the ugliest aspect of the state controlling
substance -- the state has to control the ideas about those substances in
order to maintain control.

Chris Buors

Libertarian Party of Manitoba Winnipeg, Manitoba