POLITICIANS SUPPORTING PROHIBITION SHOULD RESIGN

Re: Cauchon, letters, July 18.

Your letter writer might persuade me that Martin Cauchon, the Minister of
Justice, should resign, but only for the fact of his complicity in
prohibitionist policy up until the day of his refreshing announcement.

In the same vein, I would also demand the resignation of every other
politician who has ever supported prohibition in spite of the
all-too-obvious evidence that it is counterproductive, spawns great
corruption and crime, and is conducive to the widespread commission of
persecutions and crimes against humanity. We need only review the real and
horrible effects of the bogus war on drugs in Latin American nations to
illustrate the latter.

Drug prohibition is wrong, it is bad law, and as the U.S. Constitutional
scholar Alexander Bickel wrote: "We cannot, by total reliance on law,
escape the duty to judge right and wrong ... There are good laws and there
are occasionally bad laws, and it conforms to the highest traditions of a
free society to offer resistance to bad laws, and to disobey them." Why are
there not many more in government with even the modest courage of Mr. Cauchon?

Peter Webster,

review editor, International Journal of Drug Policy, France