DRUG LAWS USELESS

Re: Hilborn Pot Bust no Surprise to Her, Feb. 19.

Why do governments prohibit certain drugs? 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 Canada's drug laws are nothing less than a brutal
Hitler-like pogrom designed to distract our attention from more
important issues (and to provide bigger budgets and free drugs for
our police officers) by ruining the lives of the innocent few who
ingest or sell certain drugs? Bingo!

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 that were 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 instead of Jews. Like the German people
before us, the media have lulled us into tolerating state-sanctioned
evil.

Alan Randell

Victoria, B.C.