IS THAT WHAT JEFFERSON MEANT?

Dear Editor:

Letter writer Brian Lowe makes a better argument for ending socialism
than for maintaining drug prohibition in his reply to Alan Randell.
Lowe proves that public schools serve as indoctrination centres rather
than educational institutions anyway. Liberty means responsibility and
socialism has a way of corroding human dignity, if you want to discuss
"accountability." Lowe might just as well have ended his letter
advising us all to learn to love Big Brother.

Thomas Jefferson chastised the French in his Notes on Virginia: "Were the
government to prescribe to us our medicine and diet, our bodies would be in
such keeping as our souls are now. Thus in France the emetic was once
forbidden as a medicine, and the potato as an article of food. Government is
just as infallible,[sic] too, when it fixes systems in physics. Galileo was
sent to the Inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere ... It is
error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by
itself."

Jefferson clearly understood that to control the medicine and diet of
the people, the state also had to control the ideas people have about
those substances.

So Brian, from a libertarian to a socialist, I say as long as the
state gives me back the half of my check they steal to pay for all
those institutions you cherish, you got a deal.

Prohibition and ignorance causes all the death and destruction
attributed to so-called addiction.

Understand Jefferson's point now?

Chris Buors

Winnipeg