PROHIBITION ISN'T WORKING

RESPONDING to Leo Knight's screeches and bellows about marijuana (North
Shore News, Sept. 18) is much like being a lynx in the middle of a lemming
migration: There are so many of the defenceless little blighters around
that you can't decide which one to kill first.

Let's start with the idea that the Senate is "acquiescing to the dope-head
lobby." Yes indeedy, all those people who are promoting legalization are
dope-heads, aren't they? Like the editors at the National Post, whose
offices are no doubt redolent with ganja fumes, week in and week out. Like
William F. Buckley Jr. and the other authors of the excellent analysis of
the drug war in the National Review of February 1996. Tokers, "ripped,
blasted, rocked, fd up," every man jack of 'em.

In reality, an increasing number of people who have no interest in using
marijuana are supporting legalization today. We are not a dope-head lobby;
we are a taxpayer lobby. (I have tried marijuana myself, but it's not for
me: It had about the same effect as breathing deeply from the exhaust of a
garbage incinerator.)

As taxpayers, we are beginning to realize that vast amounts of our
hard-earned money are serving only to protect and strengthen organized
crime's unregulated monopoly over this commodity.

Meanwhile, the health care system is overloaded, the RCMP cannot even
attempt to prosecute frauds and scams that leave thousands of seniors
penniless, and the armed forces cannot afford a decent ship, plane or tank.
Money is being utterly wasted on the drug war, and it is desperately needed
in other places. That's the bottom line.

Knight also claims that high potency B.C. bud is "what the users want." For
some users this is true, but the evidence of alcohol prohibition indicates
that another factor is more important.

Before Prohibition, American drinkers were mostly beer and wine consumers.
Prohibition caused a sharp increase in the consumption of more potent
spirits and hard liquor, largely because a more concentrated product is
easier to transport and store without being noticed. After Prohibition,
Americans slowly began returning to their taste for weaker alcoholic
drinks. Some studies suggest that they are still in the process of doing so.

Similarly, marijuana prohibition forces growers to squeeze as much salable
value as possible out of concealed crops, which must be crammed into tiny,
hidden spaces.

This is the real reason for selective breeding, tightly controlled
fertilizing and watering schedules, and strictly metered lighting. Many
older marijuana users do want a lighter product, much like what they would
have used in the '60s, but prohibition has made it very hard to find.

The prohibition of alcohol also demonstrates that, contrary to Knight's
unsupported assumptions, organized criminals are driven out of a commodity
business when legitimate businesses are allowed in. (Either that or, like
some 1920s bootleggers, they convert themselves to legal businesses and
behave accordingly.)

This would be especially true of marijuana, because it can grow like a weed
almost anywhere in populated North America.

No organization, not even the Hells Angels, would have any hope of
maintaining control if anybody who felt like it could have a few plants
growing among the sunflowers beside the back porch.

Nevertheless, Knight's wildly spinning comments do manage to collide with a
fact that creates enormous problems for legalization: the utterly moronic
policies of the United States.

We already know that legalizing the use of marijuana while continuing to
outlaw its production and sale is nonsense: That would merely perpetuate
the criminal monopoly which is one of the worst outcomes of prohibition.

Unfortunately, so long as the United States remains in its state of blind,
vein-popping, screaming denial, legalizing the business in Canada could be
almost as bad. The border would have to be tightly closed in a desperate
attempt to keep Canadian marijuana (and, for that matter, sanity) out.

Furthermore, legitimate Canadian producers would be immediately attacked by
organized crime - which would still be funded by its government-protected
monopoly over the entire United States.

It is not hard to imagine "accidental" fires wiping out the fields of any
Canadian grower who refuses to give half his crop to bearded thugs offering
"protection."

In the long run, the presence of a bigger idiot standing next to you is
still not a good reason to continue behaving like an idiot yourself.

It is time for Canada to show enough intelligence and confidence to say
what is right, even if the presence of the fool next door forestalls action
at this time. Then we must educate that fool until action becomes possible.

Stephen Finlay is a resident of North Vancouver.