BANNING DRUGS HARMS USERS AND NON-USERS

To the editor:

Re: "Havelock homes part of nation-wide drug sweep," Feb. 1, 2002.
Aided in no small measure by uncritical news stories such as this,
our government continues to oversee a brutal pogrom designed to
distract our attention from more important issues (and provide bigger
budgets, not to mention free drugs for our police officers) by
ruining the lives of the innocent few who ingest or sell certain
drugs, especially those of Asian origin.

Please, don't insult my intelligence by insisting the drug war is
there to protect users from harmful drugs.

Banning a drug harms users (adulterated drugs and jail time) and
non-users (murder and mayhem on our streets) much more than if the
drug were freely and legally available. If that were the reason, why
don't we ban alcohol and tobacco too?

Hitler's armies may have lost the war but his ideas seem to have
found ready acceptance here in Canada.

Alan Randell,
Victoria

(You can't be serious.)