WHO'S THAT LETTER-WRITING POLICEMAN TRYING TO FOOL?

In reply to policeman/letter writer Stephen Lawrence, who opined that we
should keep marijuana illegal for the sake of our children [Letters, "Keep
pot illegal for the sake of our kids," Oct. 3]: Did he mean for the sake of
keeping marijuana available to our kids? Because that is what the policy of
prohibition begets. The black market has no age restrictions and drug users
are unlikely to respect any moralizing law.

Let me start by saying that it would have startled Thomas Jefferson, not to
mention Aristotle, this notion that the state protects children from
noxious substances. Who protects the children from all the noxious
substances in the garden shed and under the sinks? Parents protect the
children, they have since time began and they will until time ends.

And if it's virtue that you worry about, policeman Lawrence, ask yourself
if drug prohibition lives up to the four cardinal virtues of St. Thomas
Aquinas. Prudence, temperance, justice and fortitude are those virtues, and
prohibition fails on all accounts.

Perhaps the police have been protecting children just a little too long
already, because from my perspective of classic liberalism, the policeman
as guardian of virtue in America is eerily reminiscent of the role of the
Gestapo. After all, the Gestapo just wanted to instill the "right" morals
in the youth too. In that respect, where the Germans were waging a war of
racial hygiene, the Americans can be said to be waging a war of moral
hygiene - and frankly one is just as ugly as the other.

I would like to leave policeman Lawrence with one last thought from another
classic liberal from the past. "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 Jefferson.

Chris Buors

Winnipeg, Manitoba