DRUG LAWS ARE FASCIST

In response to Esquimalt News' Police Briefs, on March 25, titled "Grow-op
bust."

Why do governments prohibit certain drugs? Is it to protect users from
harm? That can't be the reason because users suffer more - using
adulterated drugs and serving jail time - when a drug is banned than when
it is legally available. Besides, the most dangerous drugs of all, alcohol
and tobacco, are legal.

Banning a drug gives rise to more crime (drug cartels, petty crime by
users, violent disputes between dealers) than when the drug is legally
available. Our drug laws are nothing less than a brutal Hitler-like program
designed to distract our attention from more important issues by ruining
the lives of the innocent few who ingest or sell certain drugs.

How was it possible that a majority of the German people was persuaded to
accept, if not support, Hitler's brutal policies? One of the reasons might
well have been a stream of "objective" newspaper accounts of the terror
that were written in such an uncritical, matter-of-fact fashion that it
seemed to the reader that persecuting Jews was "normal".

Like the German people before us, the media have lulled us into tolerating
state sanctioned evil.

Assuming you care about innocent people being carted off to jail, please
make sure your drug bust stories are less one-sided in favour of the cops
by including the comments of the individuals arrested and their families as
well as, wherever possible, the comments of someone who opposes these laws.

Alan Randell

Knutsford Place