EDITORIAL DREW THE LINES WELL

The Jan. 10 editorial - Debate On Marijuana is Double-edged - did a great
job of drawing the battle
lines clearly.

Next, I want to point out that language is very important in this and
every debate. Marijuana is a Spanish sounding derogatory term for
cannabis. Its use was meant to stigmatize Mexicans as undesirable
aliens at the turn of the 20th century. The term preyed on the more
prevalent racist attitudes of turn of the century Canadians.

Next, Dr. Andrew Weil in his classic book From Chocolate to Morphine
makes it clear that there is no such thing as good drugs or bad drugs,
there are only good and bad relationships with drugs.

There are two scales in use when talking about drugs. The state
demonization scale gives us the "soft" drug, "hard" drug political
designations. Hard and soft when used in describing pornography are
clearly moral values and not medical designations. To put it all in
perspective, the independent World Health Organization lists alcohol
and tobacco ahead of heroin and cocaine as well as cannabis on the
harmful effects scale.

All drugs are combinations of chemicals found on the periodic table.
None of those chemicals has supernatural forces of allurement. The
conclusion can be drawn from that observation that addiction is a
myth. There is only free will. There is always a moral choice to use
or not use ceremonial drugs.

The ceremonial use of drugs aspect rarely sees the light of day since
all government propaganda portrays any "non-medicinal" use of drugs as
abuse. The Orwellian notion behind that tidbit is frightening. It
means God is dead and left the plants of planet Earth to the chage of
medicine, even though the first page of the Bible has the Creator
bestowing seed bearing plants to humanity.

Finally, I just wanted to point out what I learned from liberty's
greatest champion. "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, 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," said Thomas Jefferson.

That means that in order for the state to control our drugs and our
diet, the state must also control our ideas. Just how free are we when
the state legislates ideas such as "dangerous drugs" into existence?

CHRIS BUORS

Winnipeg Manitoba