THE CRIME ISSUE: PROHIBITION TO BLAME

Dear Editor,

Erin McKay's article, "Drugs Top Langley's Crime List," was way off the
mark. It quotes police sergeant Brian Cantera as saying "75 to 80 per cent
of Langley's serious crimes, such as break and enters, assaults, thefts,
and robberies, are drug-related" mostly because of addicts stealing to buy
drugs. The real cause of all that crime is actually drug prohibition. Drug
laws drive up prices, making people steal to purchase drugs.

Drug prohibition turns what was once a minor health problem - drug
addiction - into a major social problem. Who breaks into your house to
steal money for tobacco?

Nobody. We need to regulate currently illegal drugs as we do alcohol and
tobacco. This will not result in a drug-free society.

However, neither has decades of drug prohibition.

Worst of all, though, was Cantera's claim, "If you save even one or two
kids from getting involved in drugs, you've done your job."

Is this what we have come to? We allow drug dealers to sell drugs to
children for massive profits.

Unlike alcohol and tobacco sellers, these drug dealers will not check your
kid's ID to verify age. They will sell to anyone.

And we are supposed to be satisfied if one or two kids survive these insane
policies? It is time for honest people to say, "Enough." We have seen what
drug prohibition brings, and we have had enough.

End the ill-conceived war on drugs, and allow addicts to purchase drugs
through regulated outlets.

This is the only way to really protect our children from street dealers.

Kevin Hebert Chicopee, USA

Drugs: Ban creates hardships

Dear Editor,

Why do governments prohibit certain drugs [Crime!: Drugs top Langley's
crime list, March 26, Langley Advance News]? Is it to protect users from
harm? No, that can't be the reason, because users suffer more (adulterated
drugs and jail time) when a drug is banned, as compared to when it is
legally available, and besides, the most dangerous drugs of all, alcohol
and tobacco, are legal. Is it to reduce the crime associated with illegal
drugs? No, that can't be the reason, because banning a drug always gives
rise to more crime (drug cartels, petty crime by users as prohibition makes
drug prices much higher, violent disputes between dealers) than when the
drug is legally available. Is it that our drug laws are nothing less than a
brutal pogrom designed to distract our attention from more important
issues, and to provide bigger budgets for our police officers, by ruining
the lives of the innocent few who ingest or sell certain drugs?

After the Holocaust, people asked themselves, "How did it happen?

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, written in such an uncritical, matter-of-fact
fashion that it seemed to the non-Jewish reader that persecuting Jews was
"normal." After a while, the majority simply shrugged and allowed the
government free rein to commit genocide. Despite all the talk about how the
Holocaust must never happen again, it is happening again, all around us,
only the victims this time are the users of certain drugs. Like the German
people before us, the media have lulled us into tolerating state sanctioned
evil. Those who do not use illegal drugs have become acclimatized to the
cops' incessant hounding of those innocent souls who do. We shrug and turn
the page. What to do? Assuming you care about innocent people being carted
off to jail (possibly not, because persecuting a innocent minority does
sell newspapers), please make your drug bust stories 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. Please try to put a human face on the suffering.

Alan Randell Victoria